The Subterranean Season: A Novel of Bottomless Horrors

By Dale Bailey

A disgruntled grad student finds a way to get rid of his problems in this "creepy, satiric twist on the campus novel" with an "utterly chilling ending" (Publishers Weekly).
An International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Award–Winning Author and a Bram Stoker Award Nominee

Massive crowds of adoring fans gather at West Georgia University's football stadium every Saturday to see the mighty Fighting Bobcats. Underneath the stadium, in a dingy office, PhD student Alex Kern toils away, grading undergrads' papers, struggling to pass his own classes, and bemoaning his crumbling romantic relationship. Then one day, he discovers a strange, seemingly bottomless hole. When Alex throws a rock into it, he can't hear it land. And before long, he throws something else into it: a very annoying student.


But nothing happens. No missing-person alerts. No investigations. Alex then disposes of a world-renowned Ezra Pound scholar. Still nothing. Everything appears to be fine.


Until he makes the mistake of dropping the Fighting Bobcats' star quarterback down the hole . . .


"Takes on every aspect of campus life with razor-sharp glee, especially the all-too-common elevation of sports over academics, and the unforgiving hierarchy of academia. Alex's metamorphosis, from basically decent to completely unhinged, is both terrifying and fascinating." —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Feb 11, 2025
• ISBN: 9781504090919

Dale Bailey

Dale Bailey is the author of several novels and short story collections, including This Island Earth and In the Night Wood. His short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies, such as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Horror of the Year. Bailey’s story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. He has won the Shirley Jackson and the International Horror Guild Awards, as well as being named a finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Awards.

Book preview

PART 1

Chapter 1

Alex Kern’s Very Bad Day

1

Then fall came and Alex Kern was back in school. Both terms—fall and school—were to be used in the conditional sense. It was, for one thing, only late August and the first true day of fall—September 22nd—wouldn’t come for another month. For now, heat—a sticky, wet heat that lay across the shoulders like a sodden towel—rippled off the broad avenues of West Georgia University (home of the Fighting Bobcats) and beat the grass upon its quads into withered submission. Even the statue of legendary football coach Hieronymus Harry McCloud seemed to wilt upon its pedestal, and the metal benches in the stadium that bore his name were still too hot to host the buns of even the most zealous fan.

But football was the furthest thing from Alex’s mind as he hiked past the library—a brick ziggurat of questionable taste—and mounted the steps, backpack slung over one shoulder, to the plaza where Barchester Tower pointed above its dispirited fountain like a single finger at the colorless expanse of humid sky. To be sure, as far as Alex was concerned, fall officially commenced with the beginning of the new semester. He’d long since internalized the rhythms of the academic year. But this fall promised to be different—maybe. It all depended. A week ago, after five interminable years in grad school, he’d finally sat for his doctoral examinations, three daylong essay tests focused on his presumed areas of expertise: the novel, the Victorian Age, and the Romantics. If he passed he would enter the unique purgatorial state inhabited by the Ph.D. candidate, done with classes but still a successfully defended dissertation away from donning the full regalia of the professional academic—in this case, a velvety black gown adorned with three doctoral chevrons and a hood in the flaming scarlet hue of the Fighting Bobcats. If he failed …

If he failed, he would be remanded to the ranks of lowly grad students, publicly humiliated, shunned (well, maybe not shunned, but still). If he failed, he would have wasted an entire summer immersed in the most arcane, brain-numbing minutiae imaginable. If he failed—well, the thought was intolerable. Yet that was the thought most on Alex’s mind as he slipped through an enclosed bank of double doors, like an airlock, into the air-conditioned (thank God!) lobby of Barchester. Failure. The word tolled in his head like a funereal bell. Because let’s be honest here. He’d struggled a bit—more than a bit, actually—on the novel exam. He’d never made it through Don Quixote for one thing—how could anyone read that book?—and—

He swallowed. Best not to think about it. Just go upstairs and see.

Just then the elevator doors slid open and Cam Nessler emerged, lean and handsome, with the pale blue eyes of a saint or a serial killer. Every strand of his perfectly tousled hair seemed to have fallen into place of its own accord. Nessler—he and Alex had started their graduate work together, but had never been close—was rumored to have slept his way through more than half the English department, without regard for sex or status, and the female undergrads in his comp classes were said to swoon when he made his first entrance of the semester. As if to confirm the rumors of his sexual prowess, a fairly stunning blonde hung on one arm. In the other hand? A creamy business envelope bearing the university’s crest, freshly opened. Alex felt his stomach do a leisurely somersault in the suddenly hollow vault of his abdomen.

Scores? he said, nodding at the envelope. Just came out.

Alex exhaled through pursed lips. Well?

Passed, Nessler said. Distinction on two of them.

Of course. Distinction. What else? Nessler wouldn’t be in Ph.D. candidate purgatory for long. Rumor had it that he was already well into the research for a cutting edge post-post-post modern dissertation—Žižek? Infinite Jest? Something like that—and it was a confirmed fact that he’d already published three well-received articles in respected journals. The injustice of it all, sharp as a runner’s stitch in his overheated brain, nearly felled Alex right there in the lobby of Barchester.

Distinction, he said, and then, forcing the word up a suddenly arid windpipe, Congratulations. Which ones?

Contemporary American Fiction and the novel.

Jesus. The novel?

Yeah. Why?

You’re a beast, Cam. That test was a bitch. I’m not even sure I passed.

"Sure you did. Quixote—"

Alex felt a jolt of anxiety. Had he mentioned Cervantes? Surely he had. Only an idiot would forget Quixote. But the truth was, he couldn’t recall much about the exam. What he did recall was waiting for Christy to leave for work, so he could suck back a toke or three before he walked down to campus. Just enough to calm the nerves, right? Right?

—and the rise of the middle class, Cam was saying. You nailed it, right? I’m sure of it.

Alex felt like he’d swallowed a golf ball. He could use a hit right now, actually. Something to take the edge off. It was all he could do to squeeze out a few words. So now it’s dissertation time.

That’s right. Žižek and House of Leaves. You have anything in mind?

George Eliot, maybe?

God, you’d have to work under Cape.

Which was true. But Cape—Alex’s advisor, a palsied, superannuated pedant who’d been hanging on for years as his contemporaries retired to paint, or read, or die—wasn’t really so bad. The trick would be finishing before he turned toes up. Nessler broke into his thoughts.

Listen— he said, and then he hesitated—just for the briefest second—but it was enough. He’d forgotten Alex’s name. They’d had three seminars together—three!—and the son-of-a-bitch had forgotten his name! Plus Distinction on the novel exam! It was too much! And out of pure malice more than anything else, Alex said, Why don’t you introduce me to your friend, Cam?

Oh, hell. Introductions. Melanie this is— Cam paused. Alex, Alex said drily.

Right, right. Alex. Sorry, Alex. I just blanked there for a moment. Melanie, Alex. Alex, Melanie. Melanie’s just starting the M.A. program and asked me to show her around.

Greetings followed, a limp handshake, her clean, cool palm in Alex’s sweaty, gross one. Melanie! Alex thought incoherently. Asked him to show her around! Distinction on the novel exam! That hair! Was there no justice?

None, apparently. Cam—not to mention Melanie—seemed immune to his distress. Listen, Cam said. Go upstairs and get your results, Alex. I’m sure you did fine. We have to run. I’m off to show Melanie our new office space.

Cam smiled the blinding smile that had slain a thousand co-eds—plus Melanie—and shrugged past. The two of them were halfway into the airlock before the words registered in Alex’s heat-bludgeoned brain. New office space?

Hey, he called at Cam’s retreating back. We have new offices?

Oh, yeah, Cam said over his shoulder. Don’t you check your email? We’re under the fucking football stadium. You should pick up your key and come down.

Nodding, he opened the door for Melanie. Alex had a moment to admire her perfectly sculpted rear-end, an inverted Valentine’s Day heart encased in skin-tight denim, and then they pushed through the airlock into the blistering oven outside. Alex stood there a moment longer, torn between prurient fantasies involving Melanie’s ass and fond visions of his digs on the fourteenth floor. True, he shared them with four other grad students—two anthropologists, a psychologist, and a sociologist—but the windows commanded a stunning view of the sluggish brown river that snaked around the stadium. He hadn’t even known there were offices under—

Then a wave of stomach-churning anxiety broke over him. The exams. The novel exam in particular. That creamy envelope. I’m sure you did fine.

Picking his sweat-soaked T-shirt out of his swampy armpits, Alex turned back to the elevator. When he reached out to push the button for seven, his finger was shaking.

2

Alex’s very own creamy envelope—his name neatly typed across the back—was shoved in among the stack of papers that had accumulated in his mailbox: a reminder that syllabi were due to the Director of Composition no later than the end of the first week of classes; a roster for the section of comp that he’d be teaching in the upcoming term; flyers for the Graduate Student Alliance for a Living Wage; and a rectangle of white stationary—when he saw it, Alex thought his heart might stop—that read From the Desk of Jonathan Cape, Ph.D. Below these words, Cape had printed in blocky letters—

Alex—

See me as soon as possible—

JC

That was it. Nothing else. No clue as to what Alex was to see him about—except for the very ominous fact that it was paper-clipped to the back of the textured vellum envelope that contained his—

Scores? This from Katelyn Carver, a cheery fireplug of a woman one year behind Alex. Well, open it up, she told him.

No way. Not here, Alex said, glancing around the mailroom, bustling with preparations for the first day of classes, the following Monday, a mere 72 hours away. The copy machine was cheerily spitting out the syllabus of some industrious soul. Dr. Bradham, wreathed in mailing tape, was wrestling with a box of desk copies. A guy from the custodial staff was unloading boxes of paper from a hand truck. And everywhere, checking their mail or texting or chatting in knots by the collating table, stood grad students and professors. Eyes, Alex thought with a sudden influx of paranoia. And though not a single pair of them was directed his way, Alex dumped a fistful of paper into the recycle bin—so much for a living wage—and ducked into the hall.

Alex—

Not now, Katelyn.

I’m sure you did fine.

Leave me alone, Katelyn, Alex said, and his anguish must have been evident, for Katelyn, who was notorious for not leaving people alone, for cornering them in stairwells or latching onto them like a lamprey at parties and talking—incessantly talking—backed off.

Fine, she said, heading back into the mailroom. Be that way. Alone, he stared down at the envelope in his hands. Nope. He wouldn’t open it here, either, not when any moment someone might materialize in the corridor and witness his humiliation. (By this time the possibility of a happier outcome had vacated Alex’s brain.) Distinction, he thought. Plus Melanie! Surely some men were among the blessed on earth. He wouldn’t open the envelope at all, he decided. Maybe he would never open it. Maybe he would assume a different name and get a job bagging groceries in another city, where he could disappear into the masses. Maybe he could grow a mustache and catch on with the custodial staff, like the guy in there unloading cartons of paper from his hand truck, whistling while he worked.

Or maybe he would go upstairs and hear it from Cape in person, for why else would the old bastard have paper-clipped a note to Alex’s scores? Almost against his will, Alex found himself drawn toward the stairwell. Cape’s office was one floor up and as far as Alex could determine, he never left except to teach the occasional class.

Alex was just gripping the door handle when another voice, this one thick with irritation, hooked him like a trout and reeled him in.

Alex.

Joe Henderson, the department’s administrative assistant, stood in the door of the chair’s glassed-in office suite. Alex didn’t like the tone of his voice either—annoyed, bordering on aggrieved. It wasn’t wise to piss Joe off. He assigned classrooms for one thing. If he wanted he could drop you square into Ayers Hall, a slowly decaying edifice clear on the other side of campus, more than a mile’s slog, and, worse, un-air-conditioned, meaning you would roast like a pig on a spit deep into the hot Georgia fall—and freeze after that. Worse yet, Joe had the ear of Dr. Samantha Sam Pratt herself (Dr. Brat to the more flippant grad students), a steely Harvard Ph.D. with all the charm of an anaconda. A Poe scholar with sixteen—sixteen!—books to her credit, she ruled the department with the subtlety of a third-world strongman. She’d been known to destroy careers over a poorly timed sneeze.

So what Alex said, very apologetically and with a kind of forced calm—this despite the envelope searing his left hand—was, Hey, Joe. What’s up? Did you have a nice summer.

It’s good to see you, too, Alex. Finally. Don’t you check your email?

I took a few days off after I finished my exams. Sorry.

Well, listen. I need you to be out of your office by two—this at twelve-thirty—Dr. Compeyson arrived yesterday. He’d intended to get settled before classes start, but your stuff has been in the way, okay?

Sorry, I didn’t know.

I know. You didn’t check your email.

I’m really sorry, Joe.

Okay. Whatever. But Dr. Compeyson isn’t happy and when Dr. Compeyson isn’t happy … He shrugged, leaving the rest unsaid. When the department’s star hire wasn’t happy, the Brat (Pratt, Alex silently amended) wasn’t happy, and when the Brat (Pratt, for God’s sake) wasn’t happy … well, better not to even think about that.

Besides, Compeyson really was a star. A Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow with a Ph.D. from Princeton, he’d recently finished editing a critically acclaimed, exhaustively annotated edition of Pound’s Cantos. The department had apparently paid him an unholy amount of money to lure him from his endowed chair at Yale, throwing in an apartment and weekly plane tickets to and from New Haven so that he wouldn’t actually have to move. Rumor was he’d been guaranteed a three-day schedule. He’d be flying in on Tuesday morning to teach a single class, and he’d be hitting the road again on Thursday afternoon, kicking back in first class with a drink in hand, direct flights only, thank you very much. Listen, Alex said. I have to talk with Dr. Cape really quickly and then I’ll go right up.

Good. I’ve left some boxes up there. The minute you’re packed, let me know and I’ll have Buildings and Grounds get them across campus for you. You’re in the stadium now.

Thanks again, Joe. I’m on it.

Good. And then: Those your scores?

Alex looked down at the envelope as though surprised to see it there. Yeah, I think so. I haven’t opened them yet.

Did Joe’s face soften in commiseration? Well, good luck.

A moment later he was gone, the door to the chair’s suite snicking closed behind him.

Alex looked down at the envelope once again. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, an optimistic little voice in his head piped. Maybe he’d gotten distinction, as well, and Cape just wanted to congratulate him. Maybe. But Alex couldn’t help doubting it. He really didn’t feel good about the novel exam. Sighing he opened the door and stepped into the stairwell.

3

Dr. Cape? Alex said, peering through the cracked door of Cape’s office. A single gooseneck lamp glowed within, shedding a mellifluous circle of light over a desk in fantastic disarray. Stacks of paper, yellow with age, leaned precariously this way. Towers of books leaned that way. The dim yellow square of the heavily curtained window shadowed forth crepuscular hints of still other stacks on the floor and the file cabinets, atop the chairs, the sagging sofa, and the bookshelves, these last crammed willy-nilly with still more books, papers, and files, the cumulative detritus of nearly fifty years in academia—including Charles Dickens action figures, wilting plants, poorly executed undergraduate paintings, and a still-sealed jigsaw puzzle of 19th-century London. Nothing a platoon of janitors, a fumigator, and a hazmat team couldn’t clear out in a week or so.

But Cape himself, a gnomic man with a comb-over and a wardrobe of plaid sports coats, was nowhere to be seen. Alex nudged the door open another six inches with his foot. Still clutching his envelope—a bit the worse for wear—he stepped inside. The office smelled of coffee, baloney, and mold—lunch, perhaps from the previous millennium.

Dr. Cape?

Right here, Alex. A thump followed—Goddamn it—and Cape appeared from under the desk, rubbing his head with one hand. The wispy comb-over stood more or less erect, as though he’d been subjected to electroshock therapy. He held a fountain pen aloft, triumphant as Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz.

Dropped it, he explained. I see.

Just marking exams from the spring term.

From the spring term?

Cape collapsed into his chair. One falls behind, you know how it is.

No, sir, not exactly.

Well, Cape said, rustling around on his desk. He disappeared again behind the miniature skyline of paper. One of the towers collapsed with a sigh. Well, he said, a reedy disembodied voice, you just give the entire class incompletes and grade the exams at your leisure. The only ones that really object are the graduating seniors—a pause—and you just give them A’s. They don’t seem to mind. Another thump. Goddamn it, he said genially. Then: Oh, here they are. A fist shot up like a hand from the grave, this one clutching a sheaf of crumpled blue books.

Who used blue books these days? thought Alex, recalling that he’d wondered the same thing as he scrawled his answers in fading examination booklets in Cape’s Victorian Novel class. And come to think of it, hadn’t he gotten an inexplicable incomplete, as well? Have you opened your scores yet? Cape’s disembodied voice asked. No.

Cape’s head and shoulders popped back into view, like the target in a game of human Whack-A-Mole. You haven’t?

No.

Well, open them.

I’d prefer not to.

Cape dropped the blue books. He stared across the debris field and sighed. Well, don’t just stand there. Clear off the chair and sit down.

Alex did as he was told. For a moment the two men gazed at each other in silence.

Please open the envelope, Alex. Do you plan to go the rest of your life not knowing whether you passed your doctoral exams?

I was thinking maybe an academic career wasn’t for me. The job market is flooded, anyway.

Cape leaned back in his chair. He laced his fingers atop his hard little belly, an old man in a tasteless jacket who appeared to have swallowed a basketball. He studied Alex appraisingly. When you came here, I thought you had such great potential.

Alex wasn’t wild about the past participle. Not to mention the thought.

You don’t think so anymore?

Let me ask you a question: do you want to continue in this program?

Do I still have the option?

You do. The committee has decided to let you re-test in January.

So I did fail.

You did quite well on the Romantics, actually. The other two … Cape shrugged mournfully. "I think it is difficult to pass an exam that makes no mention of Oliver Twist given a question about orphans in the Victorian novel. Especially so if you compound the error by failing to include Browning or Tennyson or Hardy on a question that deals with painting as reflected in the literature of the era. Your Victorian exam was something of a disaster."

Alex swallowed. And the novel?

"Worse, I’m afraid. Your total reliance on Watt and Brooks is almost unforgiveable. These are important critics, you understand—certainly they should be mentioned—but they are quite dated. Watt’s Rise of the Novel is more than fifty years old, and the Brooks is getting a bit long in the tooth, as well. And Moretti? Where is Franco Moretti, Alex? Still we might have overlooked the problem but for your omission of Don Quixote—Don Quixote, Alex! This really is unforgiveable. At the very least you might have alluded to Lazarillo de Tormes. Again, he sighed. I blame myself."

Dr. Ca—

Cape shook his head morosely. No, it was my fault. I was the one who recommended you as a tutor to the Athletic Program. And of course I looked the other way when you chose to teach over the summer.

Sir—

Cape looked up as if surprised to see him still there. He steepled his fingers atop the basketball. What I’m trying to say is that I know how hard it is to make ends meet on a graduate assistant’s stipend. I, too, was a graduate student in an antediluvian era. I sympathize with this crusade for a living wage, though of course it’s doomed to failure.

This isn’t your fault, Alex said, wondering how, exactly the situation had turned around so that he was the one comforting Cape instead of vice versa—though in truth it wasn’t remotely Cape’s fault. Yes, Alex had chosen—unwisely as it turned out—to take on summer teaching when he should have been studying for his exams. And yes, he had continued tutoring in the football complex, where the weaker cohort of players—which is to say most of them—were sweating to eke out the GPAs they’d need to be eligible for the fall season. But he’d also chosen—despite Christy’s continued objections (and how on earth was he going to tell her this, he wondered)—to do the bulk of his studying (as he did the bulk of many things—such as taking the exams themselves) in a light haze of Purple Kush. He couldn’t say this to Cape, of course, any more than he could have acknowledged supplementing his income still further by retailing the occasional quarter to his fellow grad students. What he did say was, I made some poor decisions this summer. It really is my fault.

Well, we all make poor decisions when we’re young. I’ve been known to make a few myself. Did I ever tell you about the time I had a bit too much to drink and decided to call up—

William Faulkner, thought Alex, who had been subjected to this particular anecdote a number of times, both in Cape’s office and in his classroom.

"We’d been assigned a paper on the dog in The Bear, Cape said. It was a seminar in the American novel, you understand. And none of us—we were drinking whiskey, you see—could make head nor tail of the dog—no pun intended. Cape allowed himself a small laugh, and Alex had to choke back the tears that had been welling up from the moment Cape had announced that he—Alex—had failed not one, but two of his examinations. So some wit, Cape went on, got the idea of calling Faulkner up and asking the man himself. He leaned forward, as though sharing a confidence. Another spire of paper slid gently off the desk. He was listed, you see. All you had to do was call information. It was a—"

Different world then, Alex thought. Despite the air conditioning, he’d broken a feverish sweat. He might as well have been staggering across the concrete desert of Barchester Plaza in the hellish Georgia heat. Come to think of it, he might die right here if he didn’t get out of this office—might keel over into the muck on Cape’s floor and just disappear, until the hazmat team waded in at last to suck up his slowly deliquescing bones with a wet vac.

It was all Alex could do not to crumple the letter up, let it drop to the floor, and succumb to hysterics on the spot. Instead, he shoved it into one pocket and slid his phone halfway out of the other one, surreptitiously thumbing the button. 1:30. He had to be packed up and out of his office by two or risk the wrath of Compeyson, and Joe, and, worst of all, Dr. Brat herself. And underneath that stream of incoherent thought, throbbing like a deep-muscle bruise of anxiety: shit, shit, shit, he’d failed his exams, and not just one of them, either. Exams. Please note the plural, ladies and gentleman. Set aside the (considerable) humiliation for a moment. What the fuck was he going to tell Christy? And even more important than that: what the fuck was he going to do—

And then Faulkner—he’d been drinking too, you see, man could knock back a fifth of whiskey a day, Cape was saying, with another chuckle. Then Faulkner says, in this inimitable Mississippi accent of his, he says, ‘Boys, sometimes a dog is just—’

A dog, Alex gasped, stumbling to his feet. Jesus, was his fucking throat closing up?

Eh? Cape said, startled out of his reverie.

Sometimes a dog is just a dog, Alex croaked. What a great story, sir. I have go now. I have to be out of my office by two or Dr. Brat—

Pratt! Pratt!

But Cape didn’t seem to notice. He just said, Sure, I understand, Alex. And I really am sorry about the exams. I had such high hopes for—

I know, Alex said, reeling out into the hall. As he stumbled toward the water fountain, he heard yet another thump—

Goddamn it.

—and then cool, soothing water filled his mouth and cleared his head. It wasn’t so bad, he thought. It could be worse. He could have failed all three.

He replayed this in his head like a litany—

—it could have been worse—

—as he stumbled toward the elevator. But Christy wouldn’t believe it, and neither did he.

4

Alex rode the elevator to thirteen—the architects of Barchester had had no truck with superstition—and walked into the stairwell. Inside, on the landing, he stepped into the dank men’s room, and stood before the rust-stained mirror, studying his face, washed out and unwholesome-looking in the flickering radiance of the overhead fluorescents. He splashed water on his cheeks—Jesus, was he really going to cry?—then locked himself in a stall and, very quietly, let the tears come.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way—despite the insistence of some small rational voice inside his head, quickly throttled, that it had not turned out any way, not while had still had the opportunity to re-test. But grades had always come easily to him—almost effortlessly, in fact—and he’d assumed they always would.

Alex had come to academia a first-generation college student fresh out of Ruin Creek, West Virginia. His dad had been a coal miner, with arcs of dark particulate permanently ground under the crescents of his fingernails (he didn’t like to shake hands), and his mom had been, well, a mom—and then some. Alex had three siblings, all of them sisters, all of them older, and, by this point, all of them married (or not) with children of their own. They’d all begun to assume the hippopotamus-like proportions native to the female of the species in southern West Virginia, as well, and while Alex understood the forces of generational poverty and corporate exploitation at work, the whole thing reminded him far too much of some scenario out of a Steve Earle song. Was it too much to pack up the chips and get on a treadmill once in a while, for Christ’s sake?

When are you going to take me home? I want to meet your family, Christy had asked him in their early days together (another past participle, another area of concern: when exactly had her interest in such matters slipped into the past tense?), but the truth was, Alex’s family embarrassed him. Why go back, when he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life trying to get the hell out of there, first through books (always his first love), then through such mild high-school analgesics as alcohol and weed (a close second), and finally through scholarships to a college world he could only dimly imagine through repeat viewings of Dead Poets Society (technically a boarding school, but still). He’d surfed through high school on a wave of B’s without ever cracking a textbook and he’d won a pity scholarship to a second-rate liberal arts college looking to leaven their comfortably affluent student body with a token few recruits from