Among the older generation of Sewanee people, observations about Sewanee life often begin with a comment such as, "In Dr. Bruton's day..." or "When Dr. McCrady was Vice-Chancellor, if you had a problem you went right up there and..." or "The Vice-Chancellor personally promised me that my son would always have a job here..." or "Until they did away with it, you could get everything you needed right there in the Soup Store..." Such comments are certainly reflections of nostalgia for simpler times fondly remembered; they are also partial indices of the kind of social change that has transformed the inherited forms of life in the Sewanee community. The continuing residents--faculty and town alike--have seen a powerful transformation of the place where they live and work, where many of them were "born and raised." Over the last fifty years but especially since the 1960's, this transformation has been general, touching most of the familiar forms of life from recreation to roads to public safety and community self-image. The transformation has also affected the way the university conducts its business and interacts with the surrounding community and its needs.

The transformation of life here has been disturbing and unsettling even while producing changes that, perhaps grudgingly, are acknowledged as beneficial. While most older residents have one or more fire stories to tell, for instance, none lament the improvements in fire and life safety that derive from having fire and emergency medical services. Some residents remember outdoor sanitation facilities and free-roaming livestock and the sanitation hazards these represented particularly in an era when wells and springs rather than municipal mains were the source of domestic water. While they may recite stories of the springtime blessing of the local livestock by the university chaplain in a procession out of All Saints and down the street, none would want to return to the penning of cows or swine in backyards. Often, however, nostalgia is not a vehicle of memory so much as a vehicle of despair, and its exercise may reflect the unease or anxiety that can accompany the experience of extensive social change. Nostalgia can function as the emotional leverage of the dispossessed against the new and the recent, particularly if the institutional personnel believed to be responsible for change are not associated with the extended orders of kin and privilege that once prevailed.

When we consider community life in Sewanee thirty or fifty years ago, even making allowances for the distortions of nostalgia, we find a world of very different character from contemporary Sewanee. Except for University Avenue and one or two other streets, most of the roadways in Sewanee were rutted gravel edged in ditches. Although more paving would come in the 1970's and 1980's, the extensive additions of sidewalks was a later project of the 1990's. It was not until the mid-1970's that underclassmen could have cars at Sewanee; in 1970 with a student body of about 900, less than half that number were entitled to cars and not all entitled students could afford them. Student cars numbered about 300, about one third the current count. Even before the completion of the by-pass when the Memphis highway ran along University Avenue, there was not the sense of automobile saturation that characterizes the campus and town today. Along the gravel roads, there were few streetlights; the gradual addition of streetlights mostly followed the admission of women in 1969. Not until the 1990's was ornamental outdoor lighting used as part of landscape planning in the central campus area. Water for the university and the town was supplied from a small watertower located at the corner of St. Luke's Hall. Water flows and pressures were chronically low, and there were few fire hydrants. The hydrants in place before the creation of the Sewanee Utility District are the old "red top" hydrants scattered along University, Tennessee, and Georgia Avenues. In 1970 the typical firecall was a house fire; in 1995, the typical firecall might be a Jaws-Of-Life highway accident, search and rescue, or landing zone for the LifeForce helicopter. The changes in all of these areas since 1970 reflect a massive transformation of the service infrastructure of Sewanee.

In contrast with the leveled but fragmented social fabric of contemporary Sewanee, the Sewanee of fifty years ago was a graded, hierarchical society tightly unified around a set of understood but not contractually stated covenantal bonds. Position, rank, and place were carefully defined by social conventions and were understood rather than asserted. These things never had to be explained. It could be assumed in such a social order that the need for any statement of its fundamental order or organization would itself be prima facie evidence of disorder: no one would think to or could imagine thinking to ask a Vice-Chancellor by what authority he made such and such a decision. No one could belong to the fabric of old Sewanee and even think to ask such a question. To be here in any fundamental sense meant to belong, and belonging implied location in a well-defined niche in one of the several groups constituting the community: the African-Americans, the local white residents, the extended Sewanee "family" including alums, retired clergy, and widows of alums, and finally the faculty. The niche one occupied was defined by covenants more feudal than democratic: secure protections specifically associated with social place and a set of formal and informal obligations that derived from that place. To live in Sewanee meant that you knew where you stood, what was expected of you, and what you could and could not do; it also meant your general acceptance of and occasional acquiescence in a set of values that infused the total community.

Fifty or thirty years ago, Sewanee could be described by the adjectives small and familiar: the important thing about Eley Green's world described in Too Black, Too White, is not, perhaps, in the devastating impact of racial discrimination upon him but in the familiarity of its face: he knew all the people who discriminated against him. By 1945 Sewanee had long since ceased to be a village, but still there were no strangers in Sewanee. Sewanee was the consummate example of the small town: a place where the people who know you know each other. In such a society there is no anonymity: not in crime or domestic tragedy, not in commerce, not in institutional decision making. Students were known by name not only in the post office but in the dining hall and at the laundry. And not only known by name but by family as well and the details of lineage and life and career were preserved in a common fund of memory that could be invoked to welcome later sons and grandsons into their life at Sewanee. This aspect of Sewanee is represented in highest form in the memories and knowledge of the Chittys but also in the fund of stories preserved by janitors, cooks, policemen, postal clerks, matrons, and shopkeepers who interacted with students and faculty in sustained diurnal encounter.

Around the time of World War II and for a couple of decades beyond, the people of the town of Sewanee were employed much as had been their parents and grandparents: most women stayed at home or were employed in domestic service, and men worked in laboring jobs that were semi-skilled. The typical job of a Sewanee resident working for the University did not require a college-degree nor even graduation from high school. In many jobs such as carpentry and maintenance, the skills required reflected strong continuity with skills used around the house and barn; little external information was required to qualify for or to remain in place in most jobs. Also, few jobs required the continuous acquisition of information or the updating of skills in order to maintain qualifications or to advance in position. A man who grew up fixing the roof, painting the barn, mowing the lawn, and repairing his truck or a woman who could sew, cook, clean, wash, and watch children possessed skills enough to gain life-long employment in the university. The continuity between these traditional skills and employment in the university created the expectation (which for generations was largely satisfied) that the members of the community and their children after them could make a living working for the university. The recent growth of information-based service jobs and the technological transformation of the physical plant, classrooms, and administrative offices has greatly reduced the need for traditional labor while at the same time placing a premium upon employees with highly refined and continuously updated technical skills. Competition for university jobs is now a reality and it cannot be assumed that Sewanee residents will be hired on the basis of traditional labor skills alone. At the same time, many older employees who were hired on the basis of their traditional skills have seen their jobs transformed and become more stressful as the technical and performance requirements have steadily increased.

As the patterns of change deepen and as resistance to change becomes the instinctive mode of self-preservation of people who do not have the skills of adaptation or who perceive a loss of personal dignity or a threat to economic status in prospective changes, there has developed a reliance upon inappropriate models of the social fabric to resist the change or to mollify the effects of change. Reliance upon such models as "village," "community," "family," "town meeting" and so on have been used by both university administrations and by local people as referential models to assess change or to deny the need for specific changes. Such models have entrapped university officials in commitments to modes of discourse and negotiation inappropriate to some areas of decision making [public safety or roadway design for instance], and have allowed residents to invent for themselves a kind of morally secure veto over proposed changes. Sewanee is neither a family nor a village, yet forms of thought vested in these modes of life are invoked to preclude change by inducing a feeling of guilt and offense. Sewanee is now much more like Atlanta than the Sewanee of 50 years ago: complex patterns of life and work, more anonymity, people choosing to live here who have no fundamental connection to its origin or history, people who have high expectations of security, culture, and status for themselves; more transients, more strangers, more commuters. Demographically, Sewanee is a small cross-section of a city, not a village. It is no longer structured in terms of the emotional bonds, kinship bonds, nor political forms of either the family or village.

New residents do not necessarily affiliate with the traditional assumptions about the character of civic life or academic life. Direct sanction and direct suasion are less effective or non-effective tools: authority is openly challenged and defied [not only by students but by people who deride the office and person of the Vice-Chancellor], and there is no longer a ground of commonly held assumptions or values that can be the basis of direct suasion. Like it or not, and despite prerogatives of charter and constitution, decision making is of necessity politicized, and a irreducible element of every decision is a consideration of the parameters of power in sustaining the decision. Decisions can be made less frequently on the basis of intrinsic merit and must more frequently consider the sources of opposition as a determinant in deciding among choices of action. This means the Vice-Chancellor and his associates can act less in terms of direct administrative responsibility and must act more in terms of consultation, compromise and conciliation. Nor does this mean that the sense of community has grown stronger or that the social character of village life has been restored to some earlier ideal. The present configuration of power in decision making represents the inevitable devolution of the traditional leadership figures of Sewanee and also of the civic fabric of Sewanee itself. Although it would be contested by some, the loss of power and authority is not equivalent to a restoration of the community but is the opposite: its fragmentation into dynamic coalitions of polycentric constituencies who are not unified by common experience nor by bonds of inherited covenants.

As larger forces in American society and specifically in the housing market among up-scale retirees continue to affect Sewanee, the demographic trends affecting the traditional fabric and function of Sewanee as a community will worsen. We will see increasing development of the rural and wild areas throughout the county and in the areas immediately adjacent to the domain. The essential rural character of the campus and its surrounding environs is quickly being transformed and will soon disappear. Formerly inaccessible and remote areas are currently provided with roads, power, and water and bring the prospect of thin but uniformly distributed development around the entire periphery of the Domain. Small sub-divisions now reach all the way beyond Orme mountain, Deep Woods is a suburb, and a dozen houses have been built under Land's End ridge. The century-old physical isolation of the Domain is already gone; another two decades will see the virtual sub-urbanization of all the surrounding areas. With this growth the university will experience continuing and increased demand for municipal and emergency services among people who do not pay a proportionate share of the expenses of these services.

The triangle of tension between the University administration, leaseholders, and contiguous dependencies will become more sharply defined and specific issues more bitterly contested. Many of these issues will lead to conflict over the University's fundamental ability to conduct its own programs according to its mission free from interference. Already, university use of its land in both development and environmental terms is contested, and there has arisen a local self-consciousness of a putative "right" to have a voice in or veto over university policy in these areas. It can be expected that elements of successive strategic plans--from the size of the student body to the location of buildings to the use of the domain for educational, social, or athletic purposes--will be challenged not only by recalcitrant or conservative faculty and students but by coalitions of local residents who have no intrinsic relation to any traditional university constituencies. Wrapping themselves in the cloak of "concern for the community" these constituencies will pursue a ruthless agenda of self-protection and self-interest by means of a high moral fervor in the name of Sewanee.

It is as customary to blame "increasing the size of the student body" for the woes of the civil fabric of Sewanee as it is to blame Wal-Mart for the disappearance of the country store. Familiar and tempting as such explanations are, they are as erroneous as they are tempting. Of much greater impact upon the internal composition and values of the university than size per se was the decision in the early 1980's, taken by the Dean and Associate Dean of the College along with the Director of Admissions and the Admissions and Scholarships Committee to change the traditional search process for prospective students. When the initial search process was directed to a national pool of students with a specified minimum combined SAT score, the pool of prospectives and the eventual character of the enrolled student body and alumni society was decisively re-ordered. Perhaps no single decision in the history of the university has had or will have such far-reaching impact than this decision, yet it is not generally recognized that such a decision was made or that it had a fundamental significance for the fabric of university life: eventually changing the demographic distribution of the alumni body, the religious makeup of the student body, and even the structure of governance. Sewanee did not become different because it got larger; it became different because the people who came here were different.

A similar transformation occurred in the community. While it is true that the local population has also grown as has the student population, this growth has not been uniformly among people who had a traditional legacy or church affiliation with Sewanee. People now live in Sewanee--and bid in the local market for housing and raise their hands in town meetings--who are here because of largely extrinsic factors: the relatively low cost of housing, the low crime rate, the social and cultural features associated with a collegiate community, the demographic simplicity of the small town over against a metropolitan suburb, the relative absence of racial or ethnic diversity, and the centrality of Sewanee to major regional metropolitan centers. Such people may have had no prior knowledge of Sewanee and no means for understanding its traditional life forms and implicit governance. While they may often be charming people who bring to the town useful skills, different perspectives, and willingness to volunteer, they also may not understand the unique qualities of the central institution that is the basis of the local society and may actively campaign against its values and prerogatives. As the surrounding non-University land continues to develop and as more leaseholds escape to outsiders this component in Sewanee will likely become more numerous and vocal.

While some tactical, transient alliances and partnerships with local coalitions may occasionally serve the short-term interest of the University, negotiation and conciliation are unlikely to remain productive resources for protecting the University's mission and goals. Firm decision making guided by already stated objectives endorsed by the governing boards will ultimately be more necessary and practically productive than negotiated outcomes. In addition, the systematic use of the right of first refusal in the transfer of leases can serve two purposes: it can redress the recent and likely continuing disadvantage of faculty in the housing market by creating a pool of rental housing, and such purchases by the University can restore more favorable demographic patterns. Twenty houses or more could be purchased for the cost of a Wiggins Creek type development, and scattered in the core area of the campus--particularly the houses of the soon to retire 1965-1970 generation of faculty--could serve as a major demographic re-focusing of the university as the corporation considers a new strategic planning enrollment goal for undergraduates.

Despite the touted diversity of Sewanee and the contributions of non-university residents, most of these residents have remarkably homogenous points of view and act collectively more to advance their own interests than to contribute to "wide ranging discussion from many points of view." Their overall value to a community of liberal learning is moot and their presence in prime leaseholds displaces faculty. The last three superintendents of leases, despite the attention given to their efforts to regularize lease contracts, have served more as agents of local realtors than as effective promoters of the direct self-interest of the university. Under the guise of improved business management, critical transfers have sometimes proved detrimental to the progress and interest of the university. The philosophy of lease transfer and management ought to be reviewed strategically from both the perspective of the mission statement of the university and from the explicit political perspective of the relative quality of the contributions of these non-university people to the on-going mission of the university. The lease transfer system ought not to be used to alienate the core residences and businesses of Sewanee and also to provide an umbrella of protection to people who then use our covenants against us. If we do not act to protect ourselves, we are vulnerable through the transfer of leases to demographic developments which will transform the core of the Domain.

Sewanee is not in the process of losing its identity as a village but has already entered the post-village world: the task of civic and university leadership is not to protect an idealized social order against change but to recognize and understand what has already happened. Although the relative small size of the local electorate and the cordial familiarity of the local polling place at election time suggest that after all, it is still a rather small place the attitudinal shift in this electorate bears little resemblance to the Sewanee of fifty years past. Change is not something that is "going" to happen here; it has already happened and affects every component of the old structural order. And although resistance to specific changes may continue to generate passionate discourse among some, the watershed between the village and the suburb has been crossed. Sewanee is suburb to Nashville, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Birmingham, Atlanta. Sewanee people routinely intersect with the people and resources of these cities for food, recreation, dry goods, automobiles, medicine, health care, banking, and legal services, and may routinely see specific people in these places with more regularity than they may see acquaintances in Sewanee. And in the gas station, bank, and post office of Sewanee the faces of strangers are as opaque as they are in any branch office in Atlanta. There is little to lament in this: the demographic forces of rural and regional transformation have been at work for more than a half-century across America and the South and the only thing that remains perhaps surprising is the naiveté of those who believed that Sewanee was immune to those forces.

Gerald Smith

Sewanee, Tennessee

September 1997