3The Lost Observatory

It may sound strange that a university can forget where it dug industrial-size tunnels, after such a fairly short length of time, but that’s quite normal. Consider this photo, of Michigan State University from around 1888:

That’s a photo of an observatory that the college used to have. It was built by a professor named Rolla Carpenter, who had an uncanny knack for carpentry, and it cost the 19th-century equivalent of $14,000, a very reasonable sum. But by the 21st century, the observatory was long gone. Where exactly had it been located? No one knew. Also, no one knew when it had been destroyed, or why.

Then, this past summer, a couple of workers were sticking hammock poles into the ground over in the east side of campus, presumably so they could set up a comfortable napping spot, when they hit something solid. They informed a professor named Stacey Camp, who had an uncanny knack for camping and who also directs the school’s archaeology program. They had stumbled on the foundations of the lost observatory, she concluded.

MSU is now going to further excavate the site, in hopes that the observatory contains one or more pieces of Eden, ancient relics of technology left by the time travelers who we all know seeded Earth with life.

2The Rocky Caves

Limestone mines are good for a whole lot of stuff once you’re done mining for limestone. You can store decades of government records, run computer servers, pipe in trillions of cubic feet of gas or just plop in a bunch of cheese. Park University in Kansas City started mining its own limestone in 1981 (kind of a weird direction to take, a hundred years into the college’s operation), and then they found themselves with hundreds of thousands of square feet of new usable space.

Unlike ancient steam tunnels, caves are comfortable places to hang out, air conditioned in the summer and naturally warm in the winter. The university leases out a chunk of the space for commercial storage. For space they manage themselves, they ran a library out of there, then when that seemed too normal, they moved the library elsewhere and put their nursing program in its place. Now, they have a simulation lab down there, so students can carry fake patients in gurneys in a mock hospital environment. It’s a perfect replication of what real hospital life is like, assuming we’ll move all hospitals below ground because the surface world is lost.

1The Hidden Slaves

Many colleges had ties to slavery, whether it’s in the form of buildings that slaves constructed or an endowment that was originally created by the university itself auctioning off hundreds of slaves. For the University of Alabama, the connection was especially awkward. They had a couple slaves buried on-campus. Jack Rudolph and “Boysey” Brown were buried next to the biology building, and no one acknowledged this.

Finally, after some protest, the university did officially acknowledge the contents of this cemetery in 2004 and apologized for the school’s past. As one law professor put it, “Our faculty owned humans; the University regulations required that the faculty were the only people who could discipline slaves, so on occasion the faculty beat slaves.”

The plaque on the site uses language that describes slavery in slightly less explicit terms. “This plaque,” it says, “honors those whose labor and legacy of perseverance helped to build the University of Alabama community since its founding.” That’s certainly one way to put it.