Ever since an order of nuns founded Marywood University, in Scranton, Pa., in 1915, its administrators have faced unusual challenges.
As Bill Conlogue relates in Undermined in Coal Country: On the Measures in a Working Land (Johns Hopkins University Press), the institution was built on land under which the mining of anthracite coal was booming. Mining was, and would remain for many decades, the key industry of Scranton and the surrounding Lackawanna Valley.
The administrators quickly learned about dangerous fires and subsidence from deadly mine collapses as well as such practices as “pillar robbing,” in which mining companies, when they abandon mines, could legally extract the coal that had supported mineshaft ceilings.
As Marywood expanded in its early years, the mining company working underneath the campus assured the nuns that it would not pillar rob. “The nuns probably should have had that in writing,” says Mr. Conlogue, a professor of English at the institution, speaking by phone about his book.
He has considered Marywood’s relationship to mining throughout his 23 years at the institution, his interest intensified by his upbringing on a local dairy farm. “It has just always fascinated me,” he says, “since I discovered there was this whole series of layers of worked-out mines beneath us and how that haunts us, on the surface, whether we know it or not.”
Coal mining no longer takes place under Scranton, and Marywood’s grounds and buildings are now dependably protected by retrofitting, modern architectural safeguards, and the filling of disused mine shafts.
Still, Mr. Conlogue asks in his book, how has the university’s history produced the modern Marywood, which all along has sought to provide students with tools to cope with life in an economically depressed region? More than that, he meditates on what the history of mining — and the metaphors it brings to his mind — can reveal about such subjects as the undermining of liberal-arts education in the early 21st century, and Americans’ shaky relationship to the environment and the places they inhabit.
As much as by chronology or theme, his book proceeds via metaphors, myths, and the literature he reads, studies, and teaches. He works such motifs as the “undermining” of his title and the “measures” of his subtitle — a reference to seams of anthracite — to consider what the region’s history of mining reveals about human folly and endeavor.
He took pains to come to understand mining geology and engineering, but much of what he writes is decidedly from the mind, and the studies, of a professor of literature — from, he says, “the books I read, which are about appearance, reality, surfaces, underneath the surface. … “
He says he hopes, too, that his book will help the many college and university administrators who will have to deal with environmental hazards and damages. Those, he says, may be from rising seas or from such money-making prospects as permitting natural-gas drilling on campus, which some institutions already do.
“I wonder,” says Mr. Conlogue, “whether those universities have thought through the legacies related to that, that they may have to deal with when the gas is siphoned off and the companies have moved on.”
