Miskatonic's darkest days were in the 1930s. Depression gripped the nation and MU was not spared, particularly after not one but two disastrous Antarctic expeditions. But the school survived by biting the bullet.

It cut all adjunct and assistant faculty. reduced the range of courses offered. Cut library hours and medical services for the campus. Eliminated eighty percent of dormitory housing. Then, having created these obviously dire straits, the adminstration turned to the foundation and said "Get donations!" And Miskatonic tapped the deep pockets of alumni and their families by using their own austerity measures as evidence of their need.

The greatest fortunes of the last fifty years had not been seriously impacted and grants poured in allowing MU to expand back to what it had been, and, more importantly, established the Miskatonic-Armitage Trust which is an independent investment fund that manages unexpended donation monies and other profits which has allowed Miskatonic to expand rapidly in recent decades to remain both a competitive Ivy League institution and a relevant force in modern post-secondary education. Miskatonic received considerable government funds for various technological/hard science projects during WWII and was a major beneficiary of the post war GI Bill. During the bonus years of the late forties through mid-sixties new alums made their own donations and endowments while the school also grew rich through its shared credit policy regarding IP developed at the school and through the prestige it accumulated through the recruitment of world-class scholars in the realm of the hard sciences and in Liberal Arts and Language studies.

Sixties student radicalism did come to the campus, but President Phillips was progressive and quickly implemented policies that surrendered the University's in loco parentis role and formally instituted a policy respecting students' first amendment rights. He was also responsible for Miskatonic's landmark efforts at recruiting students from minority backgrounds and establishing Women's and Minority Studies programs. he even dismantled MU security service and invited the Massachussetts' State Police to establish a campus headquarters and take over those duties. The last may not have been his best plan, it was some years before this forced accepted that certain draconian policies were not effective in a collegiate environment.

While Phillips' conciliatory attitude did prevent much of the outright violence that occured at other institutions of higher learning around the country, they also encouraged the students whose various initiatives did result in many programs of questionable academic value to be established, some of which survived until the mid 1990s. This gave MU a bit of a reputation as a school where it was possible to get by without a great deal of dedication to education. But since it also had several outstanding programs that reputation remained mixed and certainly doesn't apply today. Phillips' successors each followed a strict program of trying to exterminate the more "radical" educational follies he had approved (and perhaps even encouraged).

The Mythos at MU is fairly subdued. The University is not at the center of Arkham mythos activities though it is a place where many resources are gathered together (and might be used by either investigators or cultists). Its most significant mythos connection is its rare book collections, but the books that were under lock and key seventy years ago are even more closely guarded now and are generally viewed as exhausted academic resources that had been fully explored by Henry Armitage and his contemporaries. The mythos part of the collections has not expanded since Armitage's death in '33. Other mythos books might be in the library but no one has recognized them for what they are and attempted to catalog them together much less isolate them or remove them from circulation.