A Letter from the Vice Provost on Manifest Destiny: “To the Maroons of the Future”

By Killian Makepeace Warburton

May 5, 2018

Chicago, 1895

The Shady Dealer staff was digging up the foundations of Cobb for no particular reason, and discovered a small metal capsule containing a letter from our first Vice Provost on Manifest Destiny. It was slated to be opened in 1980, but was apparently forgotten. The letter has been reprinted in its entirety.

Hail Maroons of the future!

I hope you’ll tolerate a few words of congratulations from an old man. I can speak, with almost perfect certainty, that you’ve followed the Department on Manifest Destiny’s instructions to the letter. I can see the school now: stretching from 20th Street in the north to 80th Street in the south, running from the lake to the western edge of Chicago. You see, good Maroons, we are singularly charged with cultivating the South Side of this fine city. It must be as unto the forums of Rome, resplendent with scholars, libraries, and sleek, modern dormitories.

President Harper and I have spent long nights drawing up plans for the regions surrounding campus. Although it is hardly 4 square blocks now, I wish I could be alive to see it as it must be in your day, nearly a hundredfold grown! I do hope you included some of my own designs for the area. 

I am sure you have spent many hours laughing at the stockade block near the lake, wherein you can best contain the plucky orphans that have robbed our cafeterias for too long. The self-contained transit system was another idea I hope you adopted; the L is nice, but it doesn’t service the 60 acres our university now covers. But above all, I pray you finally got around to erecting the 10 story wall completely encircling the campus, to keep those damnable mountebanks and tax collectors from infesting our bounds and stunting our glorious mission.

Progress, Maroons, always progress! I sell you too short. My vision is limited by the age in which I write, but yours is the age of the future! I can hardly conceive what ingenious new plots you’ve cooked up to disabuse the ungrateful peasants ringed about us of their land. I am confident you’ve papered over those paupers with colonnades, statues proclaiming our glories, and, of course, more neo-gothic buildings than you can shake a poorly carved gargoyle at. Remember, in all your endeavors, that the crusade never ends! Fare thee well!