The history of Miskatonic Virtual University (MVU) is intimately bound up with the history of the much older Miskatonic University. Although not much is known about the very early years of Miskatonic University, it is known that the University was founded in the mid-1700s near the Miskatonic River in Arkham, Massachusetts. Being “the third college in New England and the seventh in America,” Miskatonic moved from the banks of the river to the top of College Hill in 1770. The 1800s saw the implementation of a women’s college, graduate courses, and in the 1900s a graduate school and more ‘traditional’ science courses.1 Miskatonic University is one of the only universities in the United States to specialize in the arcane, the occult, the Weird, and the abnormal. In the early 1970s, however, a splinter group of cross-institutional professors felt that a more contemporary take on the occult was needed.
Specifically, the publication of three books, all by Norbert Wiener — Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), and God & Golem, Inc. (1964) — proved to be hugely influential to the development of what would be MVU. Professors Echidna Stillwell (working at Miskatonic) and Daniel Barker (working at Kingsport College in Kingsport, Massachusetts) formed a para-research collective within Miskatonic during the mid-1960s with a focus on the interrelation between technology, cybernetics, fictional systems, and semiotics.
In the early 1970s, former Naval Captain Peter Vysparov, discontent with the work being done in his so-called ‘Cthulhu Club,’ made a large donation to the collective and encouraged them to “go virtual.”2 With the creation of the N.W. Peaslee Chair in Hydro-History for Dr. Stillwell, the Virtual University began. As the CCRU notes, “The ‘University’ had no campus as such (it still doesn’t) – hence the ‘Virtual’ of its title – but was a loose agglomeration of scholars, most affiliated to other institutions, especially MIT. (Miskatonic had been described as the ‘Shadow MIT.’) What bound them together was a shared interest in the ‘hyperfictional’ aspects of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. MVU thus brings together experts in fictional systems, mathematics, physics, geology, semiotics: all engaging in strange, crossdisciplinary pollenations that, if they are not actively forbidden, are unsupported in any other academic institution.”3 [Read more here]
In 1983, a series of magnetic anomalies in the basement of MIT’s laboratories, where Miskatonic Virtual University (MVU) illegally ran their servers, erased all records of the research conducted at, works published by, and even most of the names of faculty members of MVU. While texts were still published following the anomalies (most notably the works of Dr. D.C. Barker), most faculty members scattered (or evaporated (or both)) as the university had lost centralization and all records were, for all practical purposes, destroyed. Only a few researchers remained.
Luckily, the non-existent cyber-collective, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), began to take a deep interest in the research done ‘at’ MVU (especially the Lemurian hypotheses and the work of Dr. Barker) and MVU and the CCRU began to meld. Once the collective dissolved in the early 2000s, MVU fell even further off the digital map with only the occasional posting by Dr. Linda Trent on the Hyperstition blog. In recent years, however, there has been renewed interest in MVU, sparked in large part by the publication of Fanged Noumena (2011) and the Collected Writings (2017) of the CCRU by our friends at Urbanomic.
Us disparate MVU alumni have collective come together under the name ‘Murdock Parsons’ to compile existent documents from MVU’s heyday — both excavated and yet to be discovered — as well as advancing research into the non-standard practices our faculty began. Part historical site, part research space (is there really any distinction?), we intend to host (and mirror (and shameless use)) old and new documents and move forward. The Only Way Out Is Through.
If you are an MVU almuni or an interested party, please do get in touch!
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