Well, I'm back from an extended research trip, working mostly on the jurisprudence of slavery and freedom at Washington College -- which took me to Richmond for time at the fabulous Library of Virginia. That's the place where I first read Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery lo' those many years ago, so it occupies a very, very important place in my heart. And to the library at West Chester University, to get a copy of a cemetery dedication address from 1854, and to the Washington and Lee University special collections for some astonishingly rich archives. As I said to one of the librarians, I guess that's the kind of detail that's available when your campus isn't burned during the war!
As the paper comes together I'm going to be talking about a bunch of different things in it -- the switch from Enlightenment to romanticism to empiricism; the switch from anti-slavery to proslavery; the nature of utilitarian reasoning in proslavery thought; the differences between Washington College and VMI. And maybe even something about the nature of the college's relationship to enslaved people it owned, though my primary interest is the ideas of the slave-holding class. I know, I know -- I'm interested in the dead, white, slaveholders.
I also want to talk about the Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson cemetery in Lexington at some point soon. It's got a lot of really cool things going on there; it changes style from a typical early 19th century cemetery to a rural cemetery part way through -- which is cool enough to warrant discussion. But the people who're there are simply extraordinary. More on that shortly.
But right now I want to talk about something a little different -- campus architecture. The different styles of campus buildings is on my mind right now because I've been on so many different campuses in the past couple of weeks and, thus, have a sense of how distinctive the architure is (and how often it's unified). Two weeks ago I was at Swarthmore and then last week at VMI; I suppose it's hard to imagine two campuses with more different student bodies.
One thing I wanted to talk about regarding Swarthmore, which I have visited only a couple of times since I was in college, is their bell tower. As I was walking up their great lawn, I saw that tower and thought, how un-Quaker like. That certainly can't be their meeting house! I suppose that was a concession to the dominant style of middle Atlantic college architecture in the early twentieth century.
Still, even their new buildings are built to fit in with the rest of the nineteenth-century campus. Take Alice Paul Hall, for instance (the illustration in the upper right of this post). I started off taking that picture so I can use it when I teach In re Strittmater in trusts and estates this fall. Then I realized that I wanted it to illustrate how even over decades campus architecture can still remain fairly integrated.
And then there's VMI. Again a very consistent campus architecture. (Here's a pretty amusing vignette, by the way. As I was wandering around the VMI campus last week I had the distinct impression that one of their -- I'm guessing by her age and appearance -- professors looked at me taking a picture of the "Virginia Mourning Her Dead" monument with that look of "here's another neo-Confederate nut coming to worship at the monument to the Confederacy." Not that different from the look I got when I was in Linn Park in Birmingham back in February.)
Washington and Lee, of course, also has incredibly unified architecture -- except, I guess, for the law school. There's probably a pretty interesting story in all that.
So that leads me to two questions, on which faculty lounge readers will have a great deal of expertise. First, what schools have the most unified architecture? And which schools have the least? I'm guessing that southern schools will, by and large, have the most unified architecture -- Duke, William and Mary, and to a lesser extent the University of Alabama (though conspicuously not UNC and UGA) have quite unified architectural styles on their campuses.
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