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of fellows and scholars should be assembled with adequate stipends;
the president should receive a salary comparable to that of a state
governor.

Since President Eliot of Harvard in 1875 was still insisting that
his professors confine themselves principally to undergraduate teach-
ing and since the first modern American University--Johns Hopkins--got under-
way in the 1870's, Polk's ideas projected in the early fifties were
revolutionary indeed. Had the ideas died in blueprint, they might
well have been discounted as visionary. On the contrary however,
everything he said could be done was systematically done. Between
1856, when he invited other Southern bishops to join the enterprise,
and 1860, when with money on hand the cornerstone was laid for a never-finished
building to be "not unlike the capitol at Washington," his plans
proved in their execution that this intuitive grasp of the tenor of
the times was psychic.

So it was that the high water mark of Polk's achievement came on
October 10, 1860, when some 5,000 people came to an isolated mountain-
top in Tennessee to witness the beginning of the University of the
South. He said in public it would "rival the establishments at
Harvard, Yale, Gottengen, and Bonn" and in private that it would
be the greatest university in the world. Hearing what he said on
that day was a bright-eyed young medico-turned-priest, a Hugenot
named Charles Todd Quintard, who after serving Polk as wartime
chaplain, came back to Sewanee as the second bishop of Tennessee
in 1866 and spent the rest of his thirty-two years relentlessly re-
planting Polk's ideas. The result after a century is still modest