Way back in the day (April, 2010), we celebrated here the announcement that Hobby Lobby philanthropist David Green had purchased a beautiful campus in central Massachusetts’ Connecticut River Valley for a C. S. Lewis (CSL) College that would be devoted to the Arts and Humanities. It turns out, however, that the gift came with prudent strings; if the CSL Foundation could not raise sufficient funds for college operations by January 2012, the deal was off and the donors would look for another recipient.

Which outcome, it appears, has come to pass. Read the story here. It seems the CSL Foundation is still looking for supporters though the philanthropists have opened the doors to other proposals for the remarkable property. Unless I misread the article, it is a matter of several million dollars. Forgive me for thinking that the CSL Estate, flush with its movie millions (?), might have been expected to step in here?

Oh, well. Your thoughts?

I was caught off-guard at last week’s wonderful From Wands to Quills Harry Potter Conference at beautiful James Madison University when I learned that the two hours I thought I had to speak turned out to be forty minutes. Caught flat-footed, I was left with little choice but to abandon my original spider-outline on Hogwarts and the modern university and to share instead with friends in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a letter I found in the restroom of the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. I was there (in the Center, not the restroom) looking for evidence of C. S. Lewis’ hermetic artistry in the Wade collection of Inkling books, letters, and diaries.

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