Washington and Lee University is a private liberal arts
college in Lexington, Virginia. It is known for its close student-teacher
relationships, curricular breadth, strong traditions, and excellence in Division III athletics.
The classical school from which Washington and Lee is descended was established in 1749 as Augusta Academy, about 20 miles
north of its present location. In 1776 it was renamed Liberty Hall in a burst of revolutionary
fervor. The academy moved to Lexington in 1780, when it was chartered as Liberty Hall Academy, and built its first facility near
town in 1782.
In 1796, George Washington endowed it with the largest gift ever given to a college
(at the time) -- $20,000 in stock, rescuing it from near-certain insolvency. In gratitude, the trustees changed the school's name
to Washington Academy; it was subsequently chartered as Washington College. Dividends from Washington's gift continue to pay
about $3 a year toward the cost of each student's education. Robert E. Lee was its highly
influential president after the Civil War until his death in 1870, after which the school was renamed Washington and Lee
University.
Today the university has about 1,750 undergraduate students and 360 in the School of Law. Both the undergraduate and law
schools are in the top 25 rankings of U.S. News and World Report (2007) for national liberal arts universities and law
schools, respectively.
The row of brick buildings that form the Front Campus, which trace to 1824, is a National Historic Landmark. Separately, the
Lee Chapel is also a National Historic Landmark.
Washington and Lee's motto is Non incautus futuri, meaning "Not unmindful of the future." It is an adaptation of the
Lee family motto.
More than 1,100 undergraduate courses are offered. There are no graduate or teaching assistants; every course is taught by a
faculty member.
A quarter of undergraduates participate in varsity athletics, three-quarters in club or intramural programs. There are more
than 120 student organizations and publications, and approximately three-quarters of undergraduates belong to fraternities or
sororities.
According to The Princeton Review, Washington and Lee proves the truth of the
cliché about students who work hard and play hard. In that publication's 2007 edition, Washington and Lee scores 4th in
"professors get high marks" and 6th in professors' accessibility. The university ranks second in prevalence of beer, and fourth
in hard liquor. Combining academics with the party culture, Washington and Lee ranked 14th in "Best Overall Academic Experience
for Undergraduates." Citing many of these statistics, Men's Health named
Washington and Lee one of the 10 most male-friendly colleges in America.
W&L is a member of the Associated Colleges of the South.
Academics
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia
Washington and Lee is divided into three schools: (1) The College, where all undergraduates begin their studies, encompassing
the liberal arts, humanities and hard sciences, with notable interest among students in pre-health and pre-law studies; (2) the
Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics, which offers majors in accounting and business administration, business
administration, economics, politics, and public accounting; and (3) the School of Law, which offers Juris Doctor and Master of Laws degrees.
In all, more than 1,100 undergraduate courses are taught. The undergraduate library has more than 700,000 volumes (and a vast
electronic network). The law library has more than 400,000 volumes as well as extensive electronic resources.
Washington and Lee offers 42 undergraduate majors (including interdisciplinary majors in neuroscience, Medieval and Renaissance studies, and Russian area studies) and additional non-major interdisciplinary programs in African-American studies, East Asian studies,
environmental studies, Latin American and Caribbean
studies, and women's studies. No minors are available. Washington and Lee also
hosts the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Poverty and Human Capability.
Despite refusing to provide information for the publication, the university was ranked highly by the Princeton Review in its 2006 edition of The Best 357 Colleges for "Best Overall Academic
Experience," "Professors Get High Marks," and Professor Accessibility. It is 15th in the U.S. News and World Report's ranking of
national liberal arts institutions and 25th in the 2007 US News ranking of law schools.
The undergraduate calendar is an unusual three-term system with 12-week fall and winter terms followed by a required six-week
spring term, though a Spring Option to be absent from campus was recently approved by the faculty. The spring-term courses
include topical often-unique seminars, faculty-supervised study abroad, and some domestic and international internships. The law
calendar consists of the more traditional early-semester system.
History
Liberty Hall Academy became a college when it granted its first bachelor of arts degree in 1785, making it the ninth oldest
institution of higher education in the country. George Washington gave the school its
first significant endowment in 1796, $20,000, at the
time the largest gift ever given to an educational institution in the United States, and Washington's gift continues to provide
nearly $3 a year toward every student's tuition. Trustees changed the name of the school to Washington Academy, and later
Washington College, to honor him. [Of note: among many alumni who have followed in Washington's footsteps by donating generously
to W&L, an anonymous alumnus announced in June 2007 that he is donating $100 million to the University. This is one of the
largest gifts ever bestowed upon a liberal arts institution.)
Liberty Hall is said to have admitted its first African-American student when
John Chavis, a free black, enrolled in 1795. Chavis accomplished much in his life including
fighting in the American Revolution, studying at both Liberty Hall and the College
of New Jersey (now Princeton University), becoming an ordained Presbyterian
minister, and opening a school that instructed white and poor black students in North
Carolina. He is believed to be the first black student to have earned a degree in the United States. Washington and Lee
enrolled its next African-American student in 1966 to the law school. The next African-American
students admitted were in 1968, two men who grew up in Lexington. [citation needed]
The Lee Years
After the American Civil War, General Robert E.
Lee turned down several financially tantalizing offers of employment that would merely have traded on his name, and
instead accepted the post of college president for three reasons. First, he had been superintendent of West Point, so higher
education was in his background. Second, and more important, he believed that it was a position in which he could actually make a
contribution to the reconciliation of the nation. Third, the Washington family were his in-laws: his wife was the
great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. Lee had long looked on George Washington as a hero and role model, so it is hardly
surprising that he welcomed the challenge of leading a college endowed by and named after the first president.
Arguably Lee's finest achievement was transforming a small, not particularly distinguished Latin academy into a
forward-looking institution of higher education ("not unmindful of the future"). He established the first school of professional
journalism education in the country and he added both a business school and a law school to the college curriculum, under the
conviction that those occupations should be intimately and inextricably linked with the liberal arts. That was a radical idea;
journalism and law had always been considered technical crafts, not intellectual endeavors, and business was even worse. Yet
Lee's concept has become universally accepted, and today it would seem subversive if anyone suggested that education in
journalism, business and law should be kept separate from the liberal arts and sciences.
Lee was also the father of an Honor System and a speaking tradition at Washington College that continue to the present time.
And, ardent about restoring national unity, he successfully recruited students from the north as well as the south.
Lee died on October 12, 1870, after just five years as Washington College president. The school's name was almost immediately
changed to link his with Washington's. His son, George Washington Custis
Lee, followed as the school's next president. General Lee; his wife; his son; his father, the Revolutionary War hero
"Light Horse Harry" Lee, and much of the rest of the Lee family are buried in the Lee Chapel
on campus, which faces the main row of antebellum college buildings. Robert E. Lee's beloved horse, Traveller, is buried near the wall of the Chapel.
Honor System
Washington and Lee maintains a rigorous Honor System that traces directly to Robert E.
Lee, who said, "We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gentleman." Students, upon entering the
university, vow to act honorably in academic and nonacademic endeavors. While "honor" is often interpreted as meaning that they
will never lie, cheat or steal, the Honor System actually proscribes whatever behavior the current generation of students decides
is dishonorable.
The Honor System has been run by the student body since 1906. Any student found guilty of an honor violation by his or her
peers is subject to a single penalty: expulsion. Faculty, administration and even trustees are powerless; the Honor System is
defined and administered solely by students, and there is no higher review. Referendums are held every three academic years to
gauge each generation's appetite to maintain the Honor System and its single penalty, and the students always re-ratify the Honor
System by a wide margin.
Washington and Lee's Honor System is distinct from others such as those found at the neighboring Virginia Military Institute and the University of
Virginia because it is not codified. That is to say, unlike those others, Washington and Lee's does not have a list of
rules that define punishable behavior.
The Honor System encompasses fundamental honesty and integrity. Other disciplinary frameworks exist to address lapses of
social and behavioral standards that do not fall into the category of a student's basic honor. (If you cheat on an exam or take a
book from the library without checking it out, it's an honor violation. If you go 55 in a 50-mph-zone, it isn't.)
As a result, a sense of trust and safety pervades the community. The faculty and staff always take students at their word (and
indeed, local merchants accept their checks without question; many also extend credit). Exams at W&L are ordinarily
unproctored and self-scheduled. It is not unusual for professors to assign take-home, closed-book finals with an explicit trust
in their students not to cheat.
The Honor System clearly works. In most years, a few students are expelled after hearings conducted by the Executive
Committee, which is the University's elected student government (with the accused usually counseled by law students). Recently,
expulsions have ranged from 8 in the 2003-04 school year to a more modest 2 in the 2004-05 year. Students found guilty can appeal
the verdict to the entire student body, although this daunting option is not often exercised.
Alumni of note
- H. F. Lenfest '53 — philanthropist and CEO of Lenfest Group; gave the second
largest donation in W&L's history, $33 million, on March 21, 2007
- William E. Brock '53 — former Senator from Tennessee (1971-77), chairman of the
National Republican Party (1977-81), U.S. Trade Representative (1981-85), and Secretary of Labor (1985-87)
- Paul Maslansky '54 — producer of the "Police Academy" movie series, among other
films
- Terry Brooks '69 (law) — Author of fantasy fiction; 12 million copies in
print
- Rupert H. Johnson '62 — vice chairman of Franklin Resources, the investment management firm with $572 billion under management. In
2007 he donated $100 million to establish a scholarship program.
- Alex S. Jones '68 — Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-reporter for the New York Times;
co-author, with wife Susan Tifft, of the definitive biographies of the Binghams and Sulzbergers, who created historic newspaper
dynasties in, respectively, Louisville and New York; now head of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics
and Public Policy
- Sydney Lewis '40 — founder of Best Products, which invented the big-box retail
concept; recipient with his wife, Frances, in 1987, of the National Medal of the Arts
- Bill Miller '72 — president and chief investment officer of Legg Mason
(now a unit of Citicorp); the most successful fund manager in the business today (his Value Trust has beaten the S&P 500
Index for 15 straight years and counting), responsible for $22 billion in assets
- Donald D. Hook '50 — Professor emeritus at Trinity College, Hartford; author of
"Madmen of History" and "Clerical Failure."
In total, 27 alumni have served in the United States Senate, 67 have served in
the United States House of Representatives, 31 have served as
governor of a state, and four have served as Supreme Court
Justices.
Student activities
Washington and Lee's Trident Athletic Logo
The school's teams are known as "The Generals" and compete in NCAA Division III in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference. The student body is relatively balanced in its
political outlook compared to most elite colleges and universities. Every four years, the school sponsors the Washington and Lee Mock Convention for whichever political party (Democratic or Republican)
does not hold the Presidency. The Convention receives gavel-to-gavel
coverage on C-SPAN and attention from many other national media outlets.
Demographics
Washington and Lee was all male until 1972, when women were admitted to the law school; the first female undergraduates
enrolled in 1985. This anomaly survived as long as it did largely because, within an hour's drive of Washington and Lee, a large
number of all-women's colleges existed (and still do): Randolph College in
Lynchburg (formerly all-women Randolph-Macon College), Sweet Briar College, just north of Lynchburg, Hollins
University near Roanoke, and Mary Baldwin
College in Staunton.
As of 2005, the University is 49% female, 51% male. [1] In 2006, the number of women receiving diplomas exceeded the number of men for the
first time in the school's history.
The University has also attempted to increase the number of minority faculty and students. The student body, once totally
white, has steadily diversified. The proportion of minority students now comprise
approximately 13% of the student body. [2]
The university's students have generally been known for conservative politics. In recent years, however, the campus has become
far more diverse in its political thought. Groups like Campus Democrats and GSA (W&L's Gay-Straight Alliance) are active, the
Office of Multicultural Affairs is recruiting a more racially and religiously diverse student body, and speakers like Spike Lee
fill the seats of Lee Chapel. The faculty and curriculum reflect a strong global and progressive consciousness, as evidenced by
the strength of unique curricular options such as the Shepherd Poverty Program.
Fraternities and sororities
Greek letter organizations play a major role in Washington and Lee's social scene. The following is a list of active,
recognized fraternities and sororities.
Fraternities and Chapter Titles
Dormant fraternity chapters at Washington and Lee also include Alpha Tau Omega,
Chi Phi, Delta Tau Delta, Delta Upsilon, Kappa Sigma- Mu (Charter Revoked July 13, 2007),
Psi Upsilon, Phi Epsilon Pi and Zeta Beta Tau.
Sororities
Washington and Lee in fiction
The archetypal Washington and Lee novel was Professor Lawrence E. Watkin’s Geese in the Forum (1940) (see Sidelights,
below). The book was set in Stillwater, Virginia, home of Beauregard University.
In 1949, The Hero, by Millard Lampell, who did not attend Washington and Lee, was published; it told the story of a New
Jersey boy who went south to attend Jackson University in Geneva, Virginia, and found epic difficulty in balancing academics,
athletics and a social life. The book is dedicated to Richard Pinck, ’41, who played football in the days when Washington and Lee
competed in Division I and went to bowl games (or at least to one, the Gator Bowl on New Year's Day in 1951, before a cheating
scandal in the early 1950s caused the university to abandon subsidized athletics). Lampell adapted his own book for the movies in
1950; it became Saturday’s Hero,
starring John Derek and Donna Reed. After its release Lampell stayed in Hollywood as a screenwriter and folk-songwriter.
A Sound of Voices Dying, by Glenn Scott, was published in 1954, the year its author graduated from Washington and Lee.
It’s set at Philips-Whitehead University in Concord (!), Virginia. A year later it was issued in paperback – but in search
of a broader audience, it was retitled Farewell My Young Lover and was given a cover picture of a voluptuous, leering
young woman tugging on her bathrobe belt and, behind her, a preppy college-age boy holding a bottle of booze who can’t believe
his good luck. The cover’s teaser line is, “The Fury and Ecstasy of Young Rapture.” For many years Scott wrote editorials for the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.
In 1986, the French novelist and film director Philippe Labro, ’58, wrote L'Étudiant étranger (The Foreign Student),
for which he won Europe’s Prix Interallié. It was both a coming-of-age novel and a love letter to American popular culture of the
1950s – Buicks and Jack Kerouac and, far from least, girls of all classes and races. In 1994 the novel was made into an
English-language movie with Marco Hofschneider playing Labro; also in it were Robin Givens, Edward Herrmann and Hinton Battle.
The film came and went in the blink of an eye.
In Harry Turtledove's alternate history of World War II, Settling Accounts, the school is simply "Washington University" and
is the site of the Confederate nuclear weapons program.
Sidelights
Before it morphed into a swing and Dixieland standard, "The Washington and Lee Swing" was one of the most well known — and
widely borrowed — football marches ever written, according to Robert Lissauer's
Encyclopedia of Popular Music in America. Schools and colleges from Tulane to Slippery Rock copied it (sometimes with
attribution). It was written in 1910 by Mark W. Sheafe, '06, Clarence A. (Tod) Robbins, '11,
and Thornton W. Allen, '13. It has been recorded by virtually every important jazz and swing musician, including Glenn Miller (with Tex Beneke on vocals),
Louis Armstrong, Kay Kyser, Hal Kemp and the Dukes of Dixieland. "The Swing" was a trademark of the New Orleans showman
Pete Fountain. The trumpeter Red Nichols played it (and Danny Kaye pretended to play it)
in the 1959 movie The Five
Pennies. (Here is an audio excerpt
from a 1944 recording by Jan Garber, a prominent dance-band leader of the era. Here is an exuberant instrumental version
by a group called the Dixie Boys, which YouTube dates to 2006.)
The "Swing" was parodied in "The Dummy
Song" by Ray Brown and Lew Henderson (who also wrote "Birth of the Blues," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Life Is Just a Bowl of
Cherries." "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and "Keep Your Skirts Down, Mary Ann"). "Dummy" was recorded by NRBQ, Louis
Armstrong, Louis Prima and Glenn Miller's vocal jazz group, the Modernaires, among many others, and was used in the movie
You've Got Mail.
The noted British writer John Cowper Powys once called W&L the "most beautiful
college campus in America." The poet and dramatist John Drinkwater remarked, "If this
scene were set down in the middle of Europe, the whole continent would flock to see it!"
A Washington and Lee art history professor, Pamela Hemenway Simpson, in 1999 wrote the only scholarly book on linoleum, giving
it the sublime title Cheap, Quick and
Easy. The book also examines other home-design materials once used by the lower classes to emulate their betters.
The widely acclaimed photographer Sally Mann got her start at Washington and Lee. Daughter
of a local physician and the manager of the college book store, Mann's first job, in the early 1970s, was as the university's
photographer, and she took lovely photos, as any institutional employee must. But she also showed her trademark knack for seeing
what lay behind the curtain. In the mid-1970s her boss, Frank Parsons, encouraged her to photograph the construction of
Washington and Lee's new law school, Lewis Hall, even though the pictures would have no earthly use in promoting the university.
The mystical and surrealistic images that resulted led to her first commercial success, with a one-woman show of them at the
Corcoran Gallery
in Washington, D.C., in 1977. She and her husband, a Washington and Lee graduate, still live outside Lexington. They have three
children.
On Borrowed Time by Professor Lawrence Edward Watkin (1937) was turned into an exceedingly sentimental but successful
Broadway play. Watkin's next
novel, Geese in the Forum (1940), was an allegory about campus politics (the geese were the faculty), and soon thereafter
he left academia for Hollywood, where for the rest of his life he wrote screenplays for Disney.
Washington and Lee is home to perhaps the finest collection of 18th- and 19th-century Chinese and European porcelain in
America, the gift of Euchlin Dalcho Reeves, an eccentric 1927 graduate of the law school, and his well-matched wife, Louise
Herreshoff. In 1967, Mr. Reeves contacted Washington and Lee about making "a small gift," which turned out to be a collection of
porcelain so vast that it filled two entire houses which he and his wife owned in Providence, R.I. A number of dirt-covered
picture frames, found in the two houses, were put on the van along with the porcelain. Soon it was discovered that the frames
actually contained Impressionist-like paintings created by Louise as a young woman in the early days of the century. Mrs. Reeves
had, it turned out, been a painter of stupendous talent, certified when in 1976 the Corcoran Gallery in Washington mounted a
posthumous one-woman exhibition of her works. Their story is helped by the fact that he ("Boy") was almost 30 years younger than she ("Dol").
In 1913 a New York advertising executive and avid Civil War buff, Robert Doremus, and his wife visited the campus. A student
came up to them and asked if he might show them around. The Doremuses were so impressed by this spontaneous act of friendliness
that they bequeathed almost $1.5 million to the University, although they had no other connection to it. Today, Doremus
Gymnasium, the main gym, bears their name.
The campus took its current architectural form in the 1820s when a local merchant, "Jockey" John Robinson, an uneducated Irish
immigrant, donated funds to build a central building. For the dedication celebration in 1824, Robinson supplied a huge barrel of
whiskey, which he intended for the dignitaries in attendance. But according to a contemporary history, the rabble broke through
the barriers and created pandemonium, which ended only when college officials demolished the whiskey barrel with an ax. A justice
of the Virginia State Supreme Court, Christian Compton ('50 undergraduate, '53 law), re-created the episode in 1976 (without the
unfortunate denouement) by having several barrels of Scotch imported especially for the dedication of the new law school.
The world's first recorded streaker — his name was George William Crump — was a
student at Washington College, in 1804. He later became (perhaps inevitably) a Congressman as well as America's ambassador to
Chile.
In 1977 The New Yorker published a cartoon showing a family in a car in front of the Washington and Lee campus. The caption
was: "The College of Your Choice."
References
- ^ http://news.wlu.edu/web/page/normal/629.html#faculty
- ^ (1963) Who Was Who in America, Historical Volume, 1607-1896. Chicago: Marquis Who's
Who.
External links
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