Berry Turns His Back on UK

Wendell Berry has been the voice of Kentucky's farms and mountains and rivers for half a century. Now the integrity that defines his work has led him to reject the Commonwealth's flagship university.

Cheryl Truman at the Herald:

Wendell Berry, perhaps Kentucky's best-known writer, is pulling many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky's archives to protest the naming of Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Berry excoriated his alma matter (sic) in a Dec. 20, 2009, letter, saying the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge "puts an end" to his association with the university.

"The University's president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary 'gift,' granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University's basketball team," Berry wrote in the typewritten letter. "That — added to the 'Top 20' project and the president's exclusive 'focus' on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University."

Berry, among the most revered of Kentucky writers and a former recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, told the university "it is now obviously wrong, unjust and unfair, for your space and work to be encumbered by a collection of papers that I no longer can consider donating to the University."

The papers, which measure 60 cubic feet in volume and would fill about 100 boxes, remain at UK while Berry negotiates their transfer to the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort. He said the papers include letters he has received over the years, drafts of various books and corrected proofs.

Berry, 75, said UK's push to become a "Top 20" research university has caused it to stray from its land-grant university obligation to address Kentucky's problems.

"The coal business came up, and that for me was just the last straw," Berry said Tuesday. "I don't think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry ... and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. ... If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship."

The University of Kentucky Press published some of Berry's many books of essays, poetry and fiction that focused on the relationship between people and the land, including The Unforeseen Wilderness, a collection of photographs and essays that may have helped save the Red River Gorge from an Army Corps of Engineers dam project in 1971.

Wendell Berry is a state treasure, Kentucky's environmental conscience and a nationally-revered writer whose works will outlive UK's basketball program. This is a wake-up call for UK, but it's hitting the snooze button.