by Archana Subramaniam by CNB
Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: SATURDAY, February 13, 1993 TAG: 9302150271 SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WILLIAM & MARY
CONTRIBUTING in no small measure to the remarkable diversity of Virginia's state-supported system of higher education is the second-oldest college in America.Today, with its Charter Day Convocation, the College of William & Mary caps a weeklong celebration of its 300th birthday. In this week of February 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II of England granted the charter to establish a college in the Virginia colony. Latter-day royalty, in the person of Prince Charles, is to keynote today's convocation.
By American standards, 300 years is old.
Second in age only to Harvard (1636), William & Mary already was celebrating its centennial when George Washington (chancellor of the college at the time) was beginning his second term as the first president of the new American republic. The college was 126 years old when Thomas Jefferson (a William & Mary alumnus) founded the upstart University of Virginia. When the Civil War broke out, William & Mary was in its 168th year.
In its 300th year, William & Mary's niche in Virginia higher education is as a traditional school, nationally recognized for academic excellence.
With 7,600 students and with graduate schools in such areas as law and marine science, William & Mary is actually a midsized university. But it still calls itself a "college." It is still primarily a residential institution. It still stresses liberal-arts education for undergraduates, who outnumber graduate students by more than 2-1.
Yet for all the tradition, William & Mary could not have survived for 300 years of change without itself changing.
In 1918, for example, it became the first coeducational state college in Virginia. William & Mary's history of curricular reform and expansions go back at least as far as 1779: That year, led by board member Jefferson, the old grammar and divinity schools were scrapped, and professorial chairs in medicine, law and modern languages established.
There were times when the college came close to perishing. From 1881 to 1888, its continued existence hung almost literally by a thread - the threads of the rope pulled by President Benjamin S. Ewell to open each academic year with the ringing of the college bell. Lack of money forced classes to cease; Ewell's bell-ringing ritual during those years was the only sign of institutional life at William & Mary.
The college's revival was sparked by a $10,000 annual appropriation from the state to train male schoolteachers. Though public grants to the private college had been made before, this time it was the beginning of the end of independent status: The college's Board of Visitors was enlarged to include gubernatorial appointees and the state superintendent of public instruction. In 1906, with transfer of all college property to the commonwealth, the transition to state-college status was completed.
In the Virginia of the 1990s, there are questions about where higher education is headed, about coeducation, about funding, about the public-private distinction. Seen through the prism of William & Mary's long history, such questions don't seem quite so new, or insoluble.