Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 1, 1993 TAG: 9302010080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE TAYLOR ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Medium
W&M CELEBRATING 300 YEARS OF SURVIVAL
When King William III and Queen Mary II granted a charter in 1693 for a college to educate British colonists in Virginia, the royal governor wasn't very impressed."It will come to nothing" is the opinion historians attribute to Sir Edmund Andros about the founding of the College of William and Mary by the Rev. James Blair.
Andros, who had a falling out with Blair, would pay for his views. Blair served as the school's president for its first 50 years and was so powerful "he brought about the removal of at least three Virginia governors," including Andros, said Thaddeus Tate, who is editing a history of the college.
But Andros' comment was almost prophetic. The school had a disastrous fire in 1705, lost its funding during the American Revolution and was burned again - this time by Union soldiers - during the Civil War.
Still, it survived as the nation's second-oldest institution of higher education - Harvard was founded in 1636 - and will celebrate its 300th birthday this month with a royal visit. On Feb. 13, the keynote speaker for the college's Charter Day will be Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.
"The thing that stands out about the college throughout its history is its struggle to stay alive," said Ludwell H. Johnson III, a William and Mary history professor.
As most people know it, William and Mary dates only to the 1920s and '30s, when college President Julian A.C. Chandler vastly increased its academic offerings and the size of the student body.
"Before then it was much more narrowly Virginia based and emphasized teacher training," said Richard Sherman, another William and Mary history professor.
Except for an Indian uprising in 1622, William and Mary might be the nation's oldest college - and its name probably would be King James College, or something similar.
The Virginia Company of London, which founded the Jamestown colony in 1607, donated 10,000 acres for a school in 1618 near what is now Richmond.
But the Indian wars nearly wiped out English settlements in Virginia and put plans for a university on hold until Blair revived the idea in 1691.
The school's charter, issued Feb. 8, 1693, called for a president and six professors. The first classes were held about 1697, but it wasn't until 1729 that all of the departments - divinity, philosophy, Oriental languages, mathematics, grammar and the Indian School to bring Christianity to the natives - were established.
Among the college's most famous students in its first century were future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.
In 1776, the year that American colonists declared independence from Britain, William and Mary students founded Phi Beta Kappa. But the college barely survived the war and the cutoff of royal funding.
The campus became a hospital for wounded French soldiers during Washington's 1781 campaign that drove British troops to the coast, and classes were suspended until the fall of 1782.
For the next 80 years, the college survived because of its extensive land holdings. Johnson, in an article about early 19th century student life, wrote that rebellion against professors was common, something that contemporaries attributed to the liberty fervor spawned by the French Revolution.
But Johnson said the emerging industrial revolution may have played a more important role, with young men frustrated by a stale curriculum that was leaving them behind in an age of entrepreneurs and making wealth.
"The traditional college curriculum seemed irrelevant to this overriding ambition," Johnson wrote.
The Civil War brought yet another crisis, when the college served alternately as a Confederate barracks and a Union hospital until a group of drunken Pennsylvania soldiers burned it down.
Classes were suspended twice during Reconstruction after the college's endowment was nearly depleted. But under the leadership of Lyon G. Tyler, a son of President John Tyler who was a student and later chancellor of the college, William and Mary began to revive.
The college reopened in 1888 with a grant from the state to train male teachers. It became a state-supported school in 1906. In 1918, it became the first coeducational state college in Virginia.
"It's really only with the assumption of state control in the early 20th century that it becomes clear the college will go on," Tate said. "There were times in the 18th and 19th centuries it seemed in real danger of collapse."
Under Chandler, enrollment almost quadrupled to more than 1,200 students, and a dozen buildings were constructed.
The college has a current enrollment of 5,400 undergraduates and 2,200 graduate and professional students on a 1,200-acre campus. The faculty numbers more than 600.
Some of the college's best-known recent graduates include Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lewis Puller Jr., class of 1967, and movie and Broadway star Glenn Close, class of 1974.