Washington College
Name: Washington College
Nickname/Alias: Washington and Lee University
Language: English.
Began: Founded 1794; Lexington, Virginia, USA
Assessment: Situated in Lexington, Virginia, one of the oldest universities in the USA.
Details:
Washington and Lee University was established in 1749 by a group of Scottish and Irish Presbyterian pioneers, who had settled deep in the Valley of Virginia and founded Augusta Academy, about 20 miles north of what is now Lexington.
In 1776, the trustees changed the name to Liberty Hall, and four years later the school was moved to the vicinity of Lexington, where in 1782 it was given its charter, as Liberty Hall Academy, by the Virginia legislature, and empowered to grant degrees. The Academy’s home was in a limestone building (erected in 1793 on the crest of a
ridge overlooking Lexington) which burned down in 1803, although its ruins are still preserved.
Towards the end of his presidency in 1796, [endowed by] Washington*, who was born in Virginia, secured the school's future by making it an endowment gift valued at $50,000, at that time the largest endowment ever made to a private educational institution in America.
In 1798, the trustees expressed their gratitude to Washington, by changing the name of the school first to Washington Academy and later to Washington College. By then, the college was established on its present location in Lexington. Additional endowment was provided by the Virginia Society and from the estate of John Robinson.
These gifts, added to Washington's, formed the principal financial foundation of the college until the presidency of Robert E. [President was] Lee*. In 1865, the trustees decided to offer the presidency of the college to General Lee, an offer he initially hesitated to accept. He feared that his name, inevitably linked in the world's mind to the lost Confederate cause, might well prove an embarrassment to the college, in a time of bitter factionalism. On the repeated urging of the trustees and after turning down many offers of high positions, both at home and abroad, Lee accepted the presidency.
In the end his motivation was as simple as it was characteristic. From this vantage point he would undertake his final and most successful campaign, the revision of a college and a curriculum to be dedicated to the spiritual and material reconstruction of the South and (of equal importance to Lee) the reunification of a divided people.
Lee was president for only five years, from 1865 to 1870, although in this short time
he proved himself one of the most farsighted educational statesmen of the century. By greatly expanding the range of educational disciplines at Washington College, he transformed it into a truly national institution, a place where young men of both North and South could study together in harmony and unity.
What Lee instituted was a number of “schools,” the equivalent of departments in modern universities. Their curricula included Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, history and literature, moral philosophy, mathematics, natural science, chemistry and law.
In 1866, he was instrumental in affiliating the Lexington Law School with the college and, in 1870, the School of Law became one of the regular divisions of the college. Lee instituted programs in commercial instruction that led directly, in 1906, to the establishment of the third major branch of the University, the School of Commerce and Administration. In 1969 this was renamed the School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics.
Lee inaugurated courses in journalism, which developed by 1925 into the School of Journalism, and which is now known as the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. These courses in business and journalism were the first to be
offered in colleges in the United States.
One result of his influence and the esteem in which he was held throughout the nation, Lee was able to enlarge the financial resources of the college. Cyrus H. McCormick, the inventor of the reaper and a native of the Lexington area, was among the first to contribute.
Lee died in October 1870 and early the next year it was decided that the name of the institution was to be changed to that which it bears today, Washington and Lee University. In that same year, Lee's son, George Washington Custis Lee, succeeded his father in the presidency and served for 26 years.
The development of the University speeded up under succeeding administrations and still continues today. New buildings were erected and old ones modernized. Standards of scholarship were raised, the curriculum expanded and updated, the faculty strengthened and the endowment increased.
It is true to say that, with the exception of the World War II years which dislocated life on every American campus, Washington and Lee's forward momentum has been maintained right through the 20th century and into the 21st.
Although Washington and Lee was historically an all-male institution, the School of Law became coeducational in 1972. Then, in July of 1984, the University's Board of Trustees completed a comprehensive, year long study and voted to extend coeducation to the two undergraduate divisions. The first female undergraduates enrolled in the autumn of 1985.
Oneliner: Washington College, endowed by the first President
Bibliography:
- Thomas, Emory M., Robert E. Lee: A Biography, New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995.