[In an excerpt from the 1927 Alumni Magazine, President Smith addresses his concerns over the financial situation of Washington and Lee as well the neglect of cultivating active citizenship. For more information, please see the full article at Washington and Lee Special Collections.]
(Portrait of President Smith in Leyburn Library | Source: Kamron Spivey)
The session of 1926-7, which closed with the formal graduation of 134 men on June 7th, has been marked by many evidences of growth and prosperity.
The urgent applications for admission from almost every state in the union far in excess of our predetermined enrollment, the continued increase of our teaching force, the unusual improvement of our equipment, the exceptional health of the student body, the receipt of many important gifts toward equipment and endowment, the harmony and success of the past year’s intra-collegiate and intercollegiate athletics, debating contest, etc., all these justify, to those who desire to boost their beloved university, a heartfelt pride and joyful optimism.
This self-satisfaction and self-congratulation may be increased by the recent statistical report of the special traveling agent of the canvas for additional endowment and equipment, Mr. Verbon E. Kemp. This report reveals that the total assets of the university have been practically doubled since 1913, that its total invested endowment has been increased by fifty per cent, and that more money has been collected from living donors since than 1913 than during the whole life of the university from 1749 to 1913.
Yet the net addition to our resources actually paid in since 1913 by living donors is less than one and one-quarter millions. The total endowment, although 50% larger than before, hardly equals fifteen hundred dollars per enrolled student, instead of the accepted minimum of $5,000 per student fixed for the “Effective College” by the national rating agencies. Everyone, therefore, who desires to enable General Lee’s institution to propagate his ideals and carry on his life-work should recognize that grinding poverty, inadequacy of endowment and income, inability to hold its star teachers against the salaries offered by rival institutions, is the blighting handicap of Washington and Lee. This financial disability is made more severe and harmful by the national position and national competition of this independent institution, although palliated in the South by the similar lack of income and the hopeless overcrowding of the Southern state and church institutions.
In addition to this hampering lack of income and largely occasioned by it are two other disabilities which the friends of the Lee ideal should enable his university to remove.
The first is that the university is in sore need of four or five new buildings which would prove wonderful personal or family memorials in this “second Mt. Vernon” of the nation.
The first is a Lee Memorial Auditorium and Picture Gallery.
The second is a fully equipped Journalism Building for the Lee School of Journalism.
The third is a well-equipped and commodious Students’ Building.
The fourth is an Administration Building, that the financial, administrative, recording, and publicity agents and activities of the university may be combined and more closely inter-related.
In addition to these handicaps due entirely to poverty is a third caused and retained in part by the expense of its removal but mainly by an inherited reverence for nineteenth century ideals which have been outgrown and rendered harmful by twentieth century American conditions.
I refer to the enforced curriculum for the A. B. degree which sacrifices twentieth century higher education, civic and political training, and the practical needs of English-speaking American citizenship to an ancient over-valuation of the syntax of foreign languages and the mental discipline of abstract higher mathematics: an educational ideal which openly declares that the controlling method and over-ruling purpose of the American undergraduate training of today is to prepare its swarming thousands of young Americans for graduate study and further research, not for active, intelligent, far-visioned, broad-based American Citizenship. This, in my judgement, is the underlying cause of the ghastly waste-heap of annual “college failures” which our college boosters proudly point to as a proof of their “high standards.”