Part Three - Chapter One

My name is Dr. Brett Marsden, and I'm not complaining, but I do want my side recorded, which is why I'm putting my version of events down on paper.

When Hazel left on her wild goose chase to England, I was left behind in Upper Sharon to somehow keep the home fires burning at Cyrus College. Bills were going unpaid, student information requests unanswered, disturbances taking place on campus, but she left to spend what was supposed to be a week chatting with a friend. Whatever.

As Chancellor of Cyrus College, my responsibilities are something of a combination of provost, comptroller, and all around dog's-body to the staff and faculty. They all can leave at the end of their day, but Cyrus College is my life, and my home along The Range next to Old Main is a humble retreat where any and all might come and ask for my guidance and assistance, and many do.

To be fair, the small faculty (technically, only fourteen professors and a woodpile's worth of instructors) keeps the usual rigors of a provost's life to a minimum, and our student body is well tended to by the dean of student life. President Doone and I met biweekly (I wish it were more often), and while she can have an abrupt way about her, the truth is that we often did not have enough academic business to maintain a full hour's worth of meeting.

Except for the subject we should have been discussing, which was the fate of the college itself. The dwindling student body, the small matter of accreditation, and the future of our sort of horticultural and landscape design based education . . . all these things are what we should have been discussing, and at length.

President Doone doubtless had such conversations with the board, but she did not need to ask for my sympathy for me to know that their vision of the future was as myopic as any of their attempts at decision making. Short-sighted, short-term, stultified thinking if indeed you could call it thinking . . . but I digress.

Money, I suppose, has an intelligence all its own, but it is like the sort of cognition we're told to expect from alien beings from distant stars. We may be working on different sets of criteria altogether, and not recognize the sense being made by the other. Most of our wealthy trustees have to be respected if only for the fact that they are, and have generally made themselves, a goodly fortune; when you sit and converse with most of them, you walk away wondering how on earth they did so.

At any rate, the president can count on my complete and utter support in whatever she can achieve in gaining the attention and directing the actions of those peculiar creatures. They persist, however, in having their own ideas, each of which has to be dealt with in the form of studies and dialogues and responses that each takes an eon of their own, all of which takes time that, frankly, Cyrus College does not have.

As Chancellor of our august institution, however oddly chartered, my concern is to maintain high academic standards on the part of both students and faculty, while ensuring the long-term viability of the college. Ms. Woodhull and her mother wanted to establish a women's college of horticultural studies, thinking that they could continue to thread their own particular needle of women's liberation even while affirming a very traditional view of women's roles. To do this, they thought that empowering young women to work the land, open up and manage small businesses of an agricultural sort, and continue in their married and maternal lives with the vigorous hobbies of landscape gardening and greenhouse agriculture, all would be in keeping with their . . .  philosophies.

Whether the specific nature of the college was ever truly discussed between those two fine, unusual and unusually gifted women, is a matter open for debate. But in their shared passion for spiritualism, women's suffrage, and a love of the land and all that is rustic, they created this college, named for Zula Maud's spirit guide, and devoted to a program that fits only awkwardly into the world as we have it today.