18. Hohenheim College

The joke is that no one local goes to Hohenheim College, that its student body is made up of out-of-state students and weirdoes with pet theories to prove. The sprawling campus is among the largest in the nation, though, and the school employs a surprising number of locals. No one seems to know exactly how big the college is, though, or how many students graduate each year or even which fields of study it’s particularly renowned for. All anyone can agree on is that it’s a creepy old bunch of buildings that never seems to update, even though it adds new wings and buildings every year. The school’s primary claim to fame is an extensive library that’s rumored to include books thought lost hundreds of years ago or destroyed in purges. It’s the sort of place that has the Malleus Maleficarum and the Summa Theologiae on its shelves and a rumored Liber Mutus somewhere in its vaults.

Background

Hohenheim College began with a land grant in 1889 and received its accreditation in 1907. Since then, the school has been a popular beneficiary of much local and national philanthropy. In 1964, it began awarding the Hohenheim Award for Excellence in Human Sciences, an award of some small prestige given to the work authored in that year that represents a bold new direction in the broad field of science. Over the past few years, though, the awards have been growing more and more controversial as to the titles that have earned the award. In the past three years, the award recipients have been a treatment of parapsychology, a treatise that attempts to validate modern eugenics and a methodology for extracting stem cells from amniotic fluid.

Alternative Name(s)

Library

Type

District

Location under

New Castle