Briefly, briefly. The tiny history of “Redneck Tech” has been a seven-year battle between the most conservative elements in the state — principally local, for, as you know, Mason and Dixon’s line may be said to run north and south in Maryland, up Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore is more Southern than Virginia — and the most “liberal” (mainly not native, as the natives do not fail to remark), who in higher latitudes would be adjudged cautious moderates at best. The original college was endowed by a local philanthropist, now deceased: an excellent gentleman whose fortune, marvellous to tell, derived from pickles… and whose politics were so Tory that, going quite crackers in his final years, the dear fellow fancied himself to be, not Napoleon, but George III, still fighting the American Revolution as his “saner” neighbours still refight your Civil War. His Majesty’s board of trustees was composed exclusively of his relatives, friends, and business associates — several of whom, however, were of more progressive tendencies, and sufficiently influential in this Border State to have some effect on the affairs of the institution even after it joined the state university complex. Indeed, it was they who pressed most vigorously, against much opposition, to bring the college under state administration in the first place, hoping thereby to rescue it from parochial reaction; and the president of the college during these first stages of its history was a man of respectable academic credentials and reasonably liberal opinions, their appointee: the historian Joseph Morgan.
To console the Tories, however, one John Schott — formerly head of a nearby teachers college and a locally famous right-winger — was appointed provost of the Faculty of Letters and vice-president of (what now was awkwardly denominated) Marshyhope State University College. A power struggle ensued at once, for Dr Schott is as politically ambitious as he is ideologically conservative, and had readily accepted what might seem a less prestigious post because he foresaw, correctly, that MSUC was destined for gigantic expansion, and he sensed, again correctly, opportunity in the local resentment against its “liberal” administration.
In the years thereafter, every forward-looking proposal of President Morgan’s, from extending visitation privileges in the residence halls to defending a professor’s right to lecture upon the history of revolution, was opposed not only by conservative faculty and directors of the Tidewater Foundation (as the original college’s board of trustees renamed itself) but by the regional press, state legislators, and county officials, all of whom cited Schott in support of their position. The wonder is that Morgan survived for even a few semesters in the face of such harassment, especially when his critics found their Sweet Singer in the person of one A. B. Cook VI, self-styled Laureate of Maryland, of whom alas more later — I daresay you know of that formidable charlatan and his mind-abrading doggerel, e.g.:
Fight, Marylanders, nail and tooth,
For John Schott and his Tow’r of Truth, etc.
Which same tower, presently under construction, was the gentle Morgan’s undoing. He had — aided by the reasonabler T.F. trustees, more enlightened state legislators, and that saving remnant of civilised folk tied by family history and personal sentiment to the shire of their birth — managed after all to weather storms of criticism and effect some modest improvements in the quality of instruction at Marshyhope. Moreover, despite grave misgivings about academic gigantism, Morgan believed that the only hope for real education in such surroundings was to make the college the largest institutional and economic entity in the area, and so had led the successful negotiation to make Marshyhope a university centre: not a replica of the state university’s vast campus on the mainland, but a smaller, well-funded research centre for outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate students from throughout the university system: academically rigorous, but loosely structured and cross-disciplinary. So evident were the economic blessings of this coup to nearly everyone in the area, Morgan’s critics were reduced to grumbling about the radical effects that an influx of some seven thousand “outsiders” was bound to have on the Dorset Way of Life — and Schott & Co. were obliged to seek fresh ground for their attack.
They found it in the Tower of Truth. If the old isolation of Dorchester was to be sacrificed any road on the altar of economic progress (so their argument ran), why stop at seven thousand students — a kind of academic elite at that, more than likely long-haired radicals from Baltimore or even farther north? Why not open the doors to all our tidewater sons and daughters, up to the number of, say, seven times seven thousand? Fill in sevenfold more marshy acreage; make seven times over the fortunes of wetland realtors and building contractors; septuple the jobs available to Dorchester’s labour force; build on Redmans Neck a veritable City of Learning, more populous (and prosperous) by far than any of the peninsula’s actual municipalities! And from its centre let there rise, as a symbol (and advertisement) of the whole, Marshyhope’s beacon to the world: a great white tower, the Tower of Truth! By day the university’s main library, perhaps, and (certainly) the seat of its administration, let it be by night floodlit and visible from clear across the Chesapeake — from (in Schott’s own pregnant phrase) “Annapolis at least, maybe even Washington!”
In vain Morgan’s protests that seven thousand dedicated students, housed in tasteful, low-profile buildings on the seven hundred acres of farmland already annexed by MSUC, represented the maximum reasonable burden on the ecology and sociology of the county, and the optimal balance of economic benefits and academic manageability; that Schott’s “Tower of Truth,” like the projected diploma mill it represented, would violate the natural terrain; that the drainage of so much marsh would be an ecological disaster, the influx of so huge a population not a stimulus to the Dorset Way of Life but a cataclysmic shock; that both skyscrapers and ivory towers were obsolete ideals; that even if they weren’t, no sane contractor would attempt such a structure on the spongy ground of a fresh-filled fen, et cetera. In veritable transports of bad faith, the Schott/Cook party rhapsodised that Homo sapiens himself — especially in his rational, civilised, university-founding aspect — was the very embodiment of “antinaturalness”: towering erect instead of creeping on all fours, opposing reason to brute instinct, aspiring ever to what was deemed beyond his grasp, raising from the swamp primordial great cities, lofty cathedrals, towers of learning. How were the fenny origins invoked of Rome! How learning was rhymed with yearning, Tow’r of Truth with Flow’r of Youth! How was excoriated, in editorial and Rotary Club speech, “the Morgan theory” (which he never held) that the university should be a little model of the actual world rather than a lofty counterexample: lighthouse to the future, ivory tower to the present, castle keep of the past!
Cook’s rhetoric, all this, sweetly resounding in our Chambers of Commerce, where too there were whispered libels against the luckless Morgan: that his late wife had died a dozen years past in circumstances never satisfactorily explained, which however had led to Morgan’s “resignation” from his first teaching post, at Wicomico Teachers College; that his absence from the academic scene between that dismissal (by Schott himself, as ill chance would have it, who damningly refused to comment on the matter, declaring only that “every man deserves a second chance”) and his surprise appointment by Harrison Mack II as first president of Tidewater Tech was not unrelated to that dark affair. By 1967, when Morgan acquiesced to the Tower of Truth in hopes of saving his plan for a manageable, high-quality research centre, the damage to his reputation had been done, by locker-room couplets of unacknowledged but unmistakable authorship: