Things change. You can either change with them or get left behind. Case in point: The University of the South, Sewanee Sewanee: The University of the South. The New York Times ran a feature today about a growing controversy for this small, liberal arts college.

According to the Times, the heart of the Sewanee controversy is an identity crisis, a struggle to cling to deep Southern roots. It's really just a name change, but in a small town and at a small college, that can pass for controversial. The former official name was The University of the South, and it was located in the small town of Sewanee (the town and college are essentially one and the same). I grew up in Sewanee, and no one called it The University of the South; everyone called the town and the school Sewanee. The new name Sewanee: The University of the South is supposed to make the school seem less regionally limited and more modern. University officials think it's time to distance itself from a past that includes ties to the Confederacy and may play a part in the low minority attendance (4% African-American, 2% Hispanic, 2% Asian-American).

But Sewanee "traditionalists" aren't happy. They think the name change, along with removing references to the Confederacy, are a denial of Sewanee's prestigious Southern heritage. "They are trying to bury the founding fathers and the founding men who taught there and who had a definite part to play in the Civil War, having been generals and engineers," said Prescott N. Dunbar, an alumnus from New Orleans. "It's a silly sort of reverse thing to attract students, to keep this quiet now."

Sewanee traditionalists aren't just interested in history. They're stuck in the past. Professors still wear academic gowns to class, and prospective new subject-areas are denied if they are too practical and do not accurately reflect Sewanee's prestigious liberal arts past.

I lived in Sewanee and loved it. It is one of the most beautiful places you will ever find. But I would never go to school or teach there. There was a time when Sewanee was the elite college in the region. They considered themselves the "Harvard of the South." Times have changed, but rather than changing with the times, many in Sewanee are clinging to a lost past.