The Vault
Underneath the U: The strange history behind USD’s tunnel system
Underneath USD, three miles of tunnels connect power, steam, data and communication lines to buildings across campus. The Facilities Management (FM) crew, who roam the tunnels daily, joke that the labyrinth would make for a good base in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Actually, they’re not far off. The tunnels are subject to campus […]
Verve Vault: A brief history of USD’s structure fires
A planned arson, an ordinary fire that went horribly wrong and a building that refuses to give up. We know USD is lit, but turns out, the history of its buildings is too. In its 157 years of existence, USD has had three major fires, according to Michael Seminara, an archivist at the Archives and […]
Ernest Lawrence: USD graduate contributes to the first atomic bomb
Ernest Lawrence, a USD chemistry student and half the namesake of the Akeley-Lawrence Science Center, had an explosive impact on both the university and the world stage. Lawrence, a contributor to the construction of the first atomic bomb, was from Canton, S.D. After attending St. Olaf College in Minnesota for one year, he arrived at […]
Alexander Pell: Russian terrorist or USD math professor?
Alexander Pell, USD’s first mathematics professor, also had a dangerous secret identity. Before he came to USD in 1897, he was Sergei Degaev, a member of the Russian political terrorist organization, The People’s Will, in which he assassinated the inspector of the Russian secret police by bludgeoning him to death with a shovel. Degaev was hunted […]