The Heisler Institute
Many of the leading characters in The Mystery of Things are students or faculty of the Heisler Institute for the Study of Western Civilization on Milwaukee’s east side overlooking Lake Michigan. An institute for graduate studies in the Liberal Arts with an emphasis on Western history, literature and culture, the Institute is, of course, fictional, but its inspiration has roots in the numerous privately-funded and founded Catholic colleges and universities that have sprung up since Vatican II—institutions such as Christendom College, Thomas Aquinas College and Ave Maria University. Seen by supporters as more orthodox alternatives to older Catholic institutions of higher learning that have been led down a primrose path of secularism, and by opponents as bastions of reaction, the new institutions have often proved loci of controversy, both at the local and ecclesial level. And so it is in the novel with the Heisler Institute.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter One from the perspective of the protagonist, James Iregon, a doctoral candidate in Shakespeare Studies:
At the top of the bluff the path opened out near the Water Tower, a city landmark in Victorian Gothic. Beyond that, rising higher still with adolescent hubris in Cream City brick and blue-green glass, stood the newly completed Heisler Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
According to its own glossy brochure, the Heisler Institute was a place of advanced study dedicated to the principle that Art and Idea shape the structure of our world. Or perhaps more accurately, James thought, given the pugilistic temperament of its patron, “Mad” Max Heisler, a gauntlet thrown in the face of godless postmodernism.
Pushing through the Institute’s mahogany doors, James entered the Institute’s diamond-shaped atrium. Open to the full height of the tower’s seven stories, the atrium’s overhanging galleries met a sharply pitched roof of turquoise glass. The tower’s eastern window jutted out over the lake like the prow of a ship, flooding the atrium’s white marble floor in muted, swimming light. Tiny human figures passed to and fro high above on the upper galleries, like pilgrims making their haphazard way to some empyrean blue-green heaven. The nautical motifs notwithstanding, skeptical members of the local media had already dubbed the place “St. Max’s Cathedral.”
“‘Mad’ Max Heisler,” read one Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial, “great Lakes Bank CEO and the wealthiest and most controversial businessman in town, has built his museum of antiquated ideals, his cenotaph for Dead White European Males, the way medieval kings built chantries and cathedrals—in atonement for their sins.” In some circles the place was known as “Heisler’s Folly.”
Debra Murphy’s inspiration for the Heisler Institute building itself is the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Debra’s alma mater and hometown. (For shots of the Beckman Insitute’s atrium, designed by architect click here, here and here. Debra’s imagined a diamond shaped atrium rather than a rectangular one, and surrounded by galleries, rather than galleries just on one end, but you get the idea.) Designed by the architectural firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, the Beckman Institute building was funded (much like tMoT’s fictional Heisler Insitute) by the generous $40M donation of Arnold and Mabel Beckman.
Click here for the novel’s map illustration of Milwaukee’s east side, giving the fictional location of the Heisler Institute. Below is a Google map centered on the same area.
