Home again home again

Back from Westover late Sunday.

The countryside around Westover College and the surrounding town is pretty, with hills and forests and some fair-sized mountains visible in the distance, but to my midwestern-raised eyes, it seemed oddly disquieting. The hills (considerably steeper and closer together than the Ozarks, the hills of central Texas, or the Huron Mountains of northern Michigan) always seemed to be just a little too close, blocking out just a little too much of the sky, and the vegetation seemed almost jungle-like in its profusion, as if anything that stood still for a moment too long risked being overrun by vines and creepers.

Westover is a private and religiously-supported college, with a traditional and beautiful campus of red-brick Southern-colonial buildings around a tree-shaded campus. It would be a beautiful place to work, and the library, though small, has some pleasantly modern and populist touches, such as a good-sized CD collection of both classical and contemporary music and a leased browsing collection of current fiction, to go with the more traditional scholarly tomes and Internet terminals. The college is part of a consortium that makes it possible for it to have a good selection of electronic indexes and databases, although a different and smaller selection than I'm accustomed to.

Although religiously-affiliated, the college is politically more centrist than the much larger and much newer university on the other side of town. That's not saying much, though, considering that said university-across-town is run by Jerry Falwell.

Whether the interview went well or not, I can't say. I enjoyed talking with the library staff, and thought that I answered their questions reasonably well. The presentation went well, other than some momentary difficulty in getting J-STOR's cranky search interface to give useful search results in the demonstration. The head of the college library, however, seemed peculiarly insistent on reminding me that Westover is in a very conservative area, as if I couldn't notice for myself the two dozen Baptist churches I drove past on the way in from the airport. He also went out of his way to "casually" mention that the contract of an adjunct faculty member who had criticized the war in Iraq had not been renewed.

Supposedly, they'll make their decision in a week or two. We'll see.