For the name change to take effect, the board of trustees will have to vote yes.
Washington and Lee University, a small liberal arts university in Lexington, Virginia, has moved a step closer to being the first American institution of higher education to change its name in response to continuing protests for racial justice.
Yesterday 79% of more than 260 faculty members meeting over Zoom voted to drop the name of the confederate general. For the change to take effect, the school’s board of trustees will have to vote yes.
Today Mike McAlevey, who heads the board, said a committee would review the proposal. “We are aware that many of you think it should be easy to make a quick decision, but that is not the case,” he wrote. “We have been known as Washington and Lee University for 150 years. Reviewing the name of a distinguished and historic institution is a task not to be taken lightly.” He also said that the trustees were committed to building a diverse, inclusive community.
Only 2.7% of the school’s 1,829 undergraduates are black.
Dropping Lee’s name from the university has been under discussion since August 2017 when white supremacists marched in nearby Charlottesville. At the time, the trustees formed a committee and issued a report that rejected a name change. The trustees also voted to keep the “Generals” name for its sports teams. But the committee also said the school should acknowledge that Lee supported enslavement and the idea that the school admit only white men.
The school had wrestled with its past in 2014 when its president issued a statement in response to black law students who had made a series of demands including a formal apology for the school’s participation in chattel slavery, the removal of confederate flags from the Lee chapel on campus and the observance of the Martin Luther King holiday. In his response, then-President Kenneth P. Ruscio called the period in the early 1800s when the school had possession of more than 70 enslaved people a “regrettable chapter” and he said he would urge faculty to observe the King holiday but not order them to do so.
The school was founded in 1749 as Augusta Academy and changed its name several times over the years. It was called Liberty Hall Academy in 1796 when George Washington donated shares of stock that formed a lasting endowment. In appreciation of the gift, the school changed its name to Washington Academy and in 1813 it became Washington College. In 1865, four months after he surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee became the college’s president and served five years until his death when the school became Washington and Lee.
Under Ruscio, who left Washington and Lee in 2016, a working group put together a timeline that traces the history of African Americans at the school. A plantation owner named John Robinson left his estate, including an estimated 73-84 enslaved people, to the school in 1826. The timeline traces the sale of those enslaved people, and the fact that the school still had ownership of three people as late as 1852. The first African American undergraduate, Dennis Haston, matriculated in 1962.
Before Monday’s faculty meeting to vote on the name change, three black law school faculty members urged the school to drop both Washington and Lee. “Washington’s brutality, inhumanity and cruelty are well documented,” they wrote. “Lee’s reputation for racial violence and hatred is well known. He was a monster.”
Alison Bell, an associate professor of anthropology who heads the Faculty Affairs Committee, told The Washington Post that in 1870, Lee was the symbol the faculty wanted. A century and a half later, she said, “Lee does not represent who we are and who we want to be. . . . Lee just cannot symbolize our community anymore.”
Alumni have expressed views for and against the name change. One group, called The Generals Redoubt, formed in late 2018 to preserve the school’s history and culture. It has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the school. Its organizer, Tom Rideout, has said he wants to keep the Washington and Lee name and use it as a means to study the past, “rather than risk destroying what the two of them built.”
