College Fjord: Why Name Glaciers after Colleges?

College Fjord: Why Name a Bunch of Glaciers After Academic Colleges?

Looking at our cruise ship itinerary a few days ago, my general and academic curiosity was heightened when a saw that when we reached Prince William Sound (which you may remember was the site of the Exxon Valdez tanker oil spill disaster in the 1980s), we would be touring and viewing glaciers in a place called College Fjord.  As a college professor myself, I immediately wanted to know the back story which I later heard over the ship intercom as we toured the fjord (during the ship’s naturalist commentary).

Back the late 1800s, there were quite a number of really (really!) rich business tycoons including Andrew Carnegie (steel), James Duke (tobacco), Marshall Field (retail), Jay Gould (railroads), Edward Harriman (railroads), Henry Flagler (oil, railroads), Andrew Mellon (finance, oil), J.P. Morgan (finance, industrial consolidation), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Leland Stanford (oil), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (water transport, railroads).

As these business tycoons reached the twilight years of their lives, many became philanthropists and worked hard to “give back” for the “good of society” a lot of their fortunes.   As was their practice in business, competition even broke out between some of these businessman philanthropists to see who could make the biggest charitable splashes (and also, some say, in an effort to atone for past sketchy business practices which resulted in the unflattering title of “robber baron”).

You are already familiar with how some of these businessmen turned philanthropists gave away their money, because you have heard of Carnegie Libraries, Carnegie-Mellon University, Duke University, Stanford University, and Vanderbilt University (as a side note, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. used part of his inheritance from his father to purchase much of the land making up Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming in order to protect it from development – he later donated the land to the U.S. Government for the park).  Those you in the Bergstrom and Peake families are also already familiar with the Flagler name from Flagler Beach in Florida (named after Henry Flagler who was an early leader in Florida economic development – along with whoever invented air-conditioning!).

So back to the College Fjord story.  In 1899, one of the tycoons mentioned above, Edward Harriman (who honestly I have never heard of before this trip), went to his doctor because of physical exhaustion.  His doctor prescribed a long vacation from his grueling business work and life.  Harriman decided that for his vacation he wanted to travel to Alaska to hunt Kodiak bears.  Inspired (or egged on) by the philanthropy of his fellow tycoons, especially in the academic arena, he came up with an idea to turn his vacation into a scientific exploration of the still relatively unknown Alaska coast (recall the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia just about 20 years earlier).

So he called upon a scientist he knew by the name of Clinton Merriam who worked for the U.S. Government (and who was also a co-founder of the National Geographic Society) to gather an interdisciplinary team of scientists, naturalists, writers, artists, and photographers to come along on a boat ride (cruise!) to Alaska free-of-charge to explore and document the Alaska coast.  This became known as the Harriman Alaska Expedition (but keep in mind, it was really Edward’s vacation – his wife came along too)!

Members of the expedition research team included the famous naturalist John Muir, and also well-known (at the time) nature writers George Bird Grinnell and John Burroughs.  In an undergraduate seminar course I teach at the University of Georgia on the history of the conservation movement in the U.S., we read and discuss Muir, Grinnell and Burroughs among other famous conservationists in American history.

When the expedition reached the northern part of Prince William Sound, they discovered an unmapped bay tucked in the corner of the Sound that was full of tidewater glaciers (in fact, it has the largest concentration of tidewater glaciers in the world!).  The interdisciplinary research team included professors from Amherst and Harvard who, I guess, convinced everyone else (including Harriman who remember was footing the bill for everything) to name the glaciers they discovered after elite colleges back East.

For some reasons (I’ll have to research this more), they named glaciers on the northwestern side after (at the time) all women’s colleges and glaciers on the southeastern side after (at the time) all men’s colleges.  So, on the northwestern side of College Fjord, we have glaciers with the names Bryn Mawr, Downer, Mount Holyoke (named later after the expedition), Smith, Vassar and Wellesley.

On the southeastern side, we have glaciers with the names Amherst, Barnard, Harvard, Williams (named later after the expedition) and Yale.  A later historical commentator on the Harriman Alaska Expedition noted that the Amherst and Harvard professors “took great delight in ignoring Princeton” when naming glaciers.

Well, I very much enjoyed the story of College Fjord and I hope you have too.  I posted a photo on Facebook of the five most impressive (at least to me) glaciers in College Fjord.  If I were able to rename these five glaciers, I would humbly name them after five colleges I have had the pleasure of being associated with – from left to right, we would have Michigan State Glacier (freshman year), Maryland Glacier (sophomore-senior years), Clemson Glacier (Masters degree), Texas A&M Glacier (PhD degree) and UGA Glacier (where I teach and do research and root for the Dawgs)!

People who follow Southeastern Conference college football will understand when I say I would also take great glee in ignoring the Florida Gators when naming the glaciers (sorry Florida fans, but you now how it is! smiley face).