Since the end of World War II, each president of William and Mary had altered the College’s basic mission: first, it was a small liberal arts institution; then, a multicampus system; and finally, a small university. The next president would bring no major change in mission but would, instead, strengthen those elements that partially define university status: the graduate and professional programs. At the same time, a strong undergraduate liberal arts program would remain the College’s fundamental purpose.

Continuing the Mission

After President Davis Y. Paschall announced in November 1970 that he planned to retire the following August, the faculty of arts and sciences immediately pressed for a collegewide committee to conduct a thorough search for a new president.^[1] The Board of Visitors concurred and Rector Ernest W. Goodrich named five Board members, three faculty, two students, and two Society of the Alumni board members as the first presidential search committee since the 1942 election of John E. Pomfret.^[2]

Goodrich chaired the committee; retiring Vice-President for Academic Affairs W. Melville Jones served as coordinator. Charged with submitting five names for the Board’s consideration, the committee met frequently during the winter and spring of 1971. It quickly compiled a list of 224 possible candidates and also reviewed 89 names from Harvard University’s recent presidential search.^[3] Rebuffing a move to submit only the name of early favorite Blake T. Newton, Jr., the committee narrowed the list to five names, which it presented to the Board on May 21. Thomas A Graves, Jr., ranked first.^[4]

After interviewing the two front-runners, Graves and Newton, again the next day, the Board declined to accept the search committee’s recommendation of Graves. Instead, each Board member cast a secret, written ballot to decide on one of these two men.^[5] Of the fifteen members voting, one man, Harry L. Snyder, had to leave before the balloting began. Assured that his proxy would count, he entrusted it to Rector Goodrich. When the remaining votes were tallied, there were seven each for Graves and Newton, and the rector announced a tie. Puzzled Board members tried to unravel the mathematical mystery of a seven-to-seven tie when fifteen people had voted. Goodrich then produced the proxy and said, “Here in my pocket is Harry Snyder’s vote, and it is for Newton.” But Vice-Rector R. Harvey Chappell, Jr., stated that Snyder’s vote could not be included because the rector had already announced a tie and because the Board’s bylaws made no provisions for proxies. Had the proxy been counted, Newton would have won on the first ballot.^[6]

After a heated discussion between the rector, who emphasized the Board’s authority to choose anyone it wished, and Vice-President Jones, the coordinator, who stoutly supported the search committee’s choice of Graves, the Board voted again. A switch by one member and disregarding the proxy tipped the vote to eight for Graves, six for Newton, and the Board then politely made the election unanimous.^[7]

Who was this man who had been so narrowly elected as president of William and Mary? Born on July 3, 1924, in Buffalo, New York, Thomas Ashley Graves, Jr., brought impressive credentials to his new post. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he graduated from Yale University, then earned a master of business administration degree and in 1958, a doctor of business administration degree, both from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was about educational administration, and he later wrote several articles on this topic. While at Harvard, he became assistant dean and associate director of the doctoral program of the graduate school.

From 1960 to 1964 Graves directed the International Management Development Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland. For the next three years, he was associate dean and director of the International Center for the Advancement of Management Education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. In 1967 he returned to Harvard as an associate dean and remained there until called to William and Mary.^[8] Graves’s education and career, then, provided still a different perspective on the presidency of the College than had the backgrounds of the other post-World War II presidents: Pomfret had been a scholar; Alvin D. Chandler had had a distinguished naval career; and Paschall had spent years in public education. The new president was an academician versed in college administration, and who also had a business management orientation. Although he lacked Paschall’s connections with the political power structure in Virginia, Graves’s business acumen seemed appropriate for the financial straits that the College, and all educational institutions, faced in the early 1970s.^[9]

Coupled with intelligence and ability went a genial personality. When Graves had visited the campus in April, he had favorably impressed students, faculty, administrators, and Board members with his charm, friendliness, warmth, and intense interest in all facets of William and Mary and its liberal arts tradition.^[10] The whole College community eagerly awaited its new president, and the student newspaper predicted “a new era of progressive change, spirit, and unity.”^[11]

After Graves was sworn in on September 1, 1971, he quickly announced his goals: the College should provide a first-rate undergraduate liberal arts education and select graduate programs. The College’s ultimate goal, he said, should be excellence in all matters.^[12] When he was inaugurated on Charter Day, February 5, 1972, Graves repeated the currently fashionable but nebulous goal of excellence as the key to the College’s development. To achieve excellence, the College must remain a small residential university; attract outstanding students; strengthen its graduate, professional, and research programs; and search for outside funding.^[13] William and Mary already was, Graves thought, a good educational institution; he had no plans to change the small-university mission that Paschall had begun.^[14]

It was Graves’s misfortune to come into the presidency during the economically chaotic 1970s. Gone were the halcyon days of the 1960s when the Paschall administration had benefitted from lavish funding by the state and federal governments for construction, grants, student aid, and a multitude of programs. Instead, Graves faced an era dominated by several recessions, oil shortages brought on by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the resulting double-digit inflation. Such federal remedies as enforced wage and price controls and freezes or later, voluntary controls, only exacerbated the nation’s economic woes, and in turn, adversely affected the commonwealth’s economy and the College’s budget. Consequently, Graves would spend his years as president in search of funds as well as excellence.^[15]

To help Graves and William and Mary pursue their goals, the decennial self-study, mandated by the College’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, got under way in 1972, and Graves named Martin A. Garrett, associate professor of economics, as chairman of the study’s steering committee.^[16] The study described William and Mary as the prototype of a “miniversity.” The College’s primary mission was undergraduate liberal arts education, and select graduate programs.^[17]

Before the report was even complete, a threat arose to the College’s determination to remain a small, residential institution. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia had commissioned Donald Shaner Associates to study such aspects as business practices and classroom usage at all state institutions. At William and Mary the building boom of the 1960s had produced an abundance of classroom space, which the Shaner Report recommended utilizing to accommodate ten thousand students—double the 1973 enrollment Graves spoke before the Virginia Commission on Higher Education and successfully defended the College against this attempt to destroy its unique mission.^[18]

Soon the Self-Study Report: 1974 was ready, and among its suggestions was an administration shared by students, faculty, and administrators. To this end, a faculty senate would be helpful, as would more faculty input in running the departments and schools and more collegewide academic programs and committees. The study recommended a more diversified student body, more experimental programs, an end to sex inequalities in housing and athletics, and beginning long-range planning. For the faculty, there should be sabbaticals and more research funding. Pleased with these recommendations, Graves considered the self-study as a “map” for the College to attain “new levels of excellence.”^[19]

After a visitation committee came to William and Mary in April 1974, the Southern Association soon reaffirmed the College’s accreditation. However, the group found that the College, in emphasizing its undergraduate liberal arts mission, had downplayed its character as a small university.^[20] Another ten years would pass before a new self-study would appraise the College’s success in following the 1974 “map.”

Perhaps those most affected by William and Mary’s direction were the students, and during the Graves era, enrollment grew from 4,531 in 1971 to 6,640 in 1984, when there were 300 more women than men. Virginians consistently made up about 70 percent of the student body, and the mid-Atlantic states contributed the largest bloc of out-of-state students.^[21] Selectivity in admissions remained the cornerstone of William and Mary’s high quality, and by the fall of 1984, only 48 percent of applicants actually enrolled, and about 53 percent were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. Gone was the outmoded requirement that students rank in the top half of their high school classes; instead, the College now recommended a solid core of academic courses.^[22] Student scores on the required SAT had peaked at 1235 in the fall of 1969, vacillated in the upper 1100s during the next decade, and were 1185 in the fall of 1984.^[23] Although the decline reflected a nationwide trend, William and Mary’s lowered SATs were due, in part, to a special admissions policy begun in 1973. Under this policy, minorities, grants-in-aid athletes, and children of alumni were not held to the same rigorous standards as other students. In a few years, these special admissions comprised 23 percent of the freshman class.^[24]

The College looked for more ways to attract exceptional students. In 1978 William and Mary, like many other colleges throughout the country, began admitting a few nontraditional students, who were often older, resuming an interrupted education, and attending part-time. The College also permitted some freshmen to enter after their junior year in high school and allowed a few local students to enroll in College classes while they were still in secondary school.^[25]

Educational costs spiraled during the 1970s and early 1980s, and many students had to find sources of financial aid. The work-study program offered part-time jobs at the College and in Williamsburg, and the College awarded a few academic scholarships. The bulk of financial assistance came from federal, state, private, and College funds; and by 1984 grants and loans totaled over $2.4 million awarded to 857 students.^[26]

By the mid-1980s postgraduate training had become a logical extension of a college education, and about 40 percent of William and Mary graduates went to a variety of professional and graduate schools. The College continued its exchange scholarships with the University of Exeter and the University of St. Andrews and also began a junior-year-abroad program. In 1984 fifty-six William and Mary students studied abroad.^[27] The exchange with the University of Muenster in West Germany, begun in 1974, ended because of lack of funds. A similar fate befell the Drapers’ Company Exchange.

To establish a better rapport with students, Graves initiated the president’s hour, a time for them to stop by his office and chat. He gave them a larger role in College governance by appointing them to various committees. Although Graves favored student attendance at Board of Visitors meetings, nothing more than a student liaison committee materialized.^[28] The tension that had characterized the relationship between the president and the students during the last years of the Paschall administration virtually disappeared because the root causes of student unrest—the unpopular Vietnam War and the lack of a voice in devising parietal regulations—were dissipating.

Graves believed that students should share “fully in the educational and social deliberations and decisions that affect their lives.” Students were, he said, responsible and mature, capable of sharing governance of their own lives.^[29] The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1971, lowered the age of majority to eighteen and buttressed Graves’s beliefs. He rapidly removed sources of earlier student agitation.

First were dormitory visitation regulations. In the fall of 1970, Paschall had allowed open houses on weekends under strict supervision.^[30] As soon as Graves became president, student pressure mounted to ease the restrictions, and in March 1972 Graves backed student proposals to abolish curfews and sign-out cards for women. The next month he liberalized dormitory visitation rules so that students themselves could determine policies and procedures for their own residence halls.^[31] When the new self-determination policy became effective in September 1972, it marked the end of the in loco parentis role that the College had performed since its founding.

Another student cause from the late 1960s was the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. An acceptable version had appeared in the Student Handbook of 1970, but as time passed, more tinkering and modifications extended protected rights. A new statement in 1973 granted rights and privileges to faculty and administrators and also included the right of confidentiality of student records, authorized by federal law. Third parties, including parents, could not have access to their children’s academic records without the students’ consent.^[32] More minor changes during the next few years led to a revised Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which was approved by the entire College community in 1977.^[33]

Yet another earlier provocation of student agitation had been the student newspaper, the Flat Hat. Through inflammatory and obscene headlines, articles, and editorials, it had exacerbated student discontent. In September 1971 Graves named a Publications Council to oversee the finances, standards, and products of all student publications and of the radio station.^[34] There were no more “distasteful” headlines in the Flat Hat, perhaps largely because the reasons for student unrest were waning.

With the major causes of dissent defused, students turned to less serious pursuits. Some took part in a craze sweeping American campuses in 1974: streaking. These nude runs across campus or down Richmond Road culminated in an Easter Sunday motorcycle streak by three men on a maroon Honda who disrupted an Easter egg hunt in the Common Glory parking lot. The three were arrested, then fined for disorderly conduct and failure to wear safety equipment.^[35]

As the students enjoyed the relatively peaceful campus life prevailing during the Graves era, they studied under a curriculum that saw few substantive changes. The revised curriculum that went into effect in 1971 had relaxed the rigid distribution system of earlier years, but many faculty came to believe that the pendulum had swung too far in loosening degree requirements. In 1979 a general study of the curriculum began, and two years later the faculty of arts and sciences tightened it by raising the number of required area and sequence courses from eight to eleven and by adding a laboratory course in physical or biological science.^[36] Area and sequence requirements continued to undergird the liberal arts education.^[37] Other options developed. In addition to the standard concentration in one subject, students could, as time went on, choose interdisciplinary studies, have a double concentration, or pursue a major and a minor.^[38]

In 1983 the College began a new program to strengthen weaknesses in students’ writing skills—a weakness shared with many other American students. Freshmen had to satisfy a writing requirement by either proficiency testing or classwork and also meet writing standards set by their departments or schools.^[39] Other institutions such as Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Wisconsin had already begun similar programs.

Several innovations, typical in contemporary American education, broadened curricular offerings.^[40] Project Plus, begun in 1972, provided a total educational experience by allowing eighty-four students to live and take some of their classes in a common residence hall.^[41] Similarly, special interest residences included language houses and a creative arts house.^[42] After Project Plus ended in 1981, the College began a new honors program of the multidisciplinary study of topics such as great books and works of art. Another form of honors was offering a few superior freshmen the prestigious title of Presidential Scholar. The College continued its departmental honors for outstanding concentrators and awarded them degrees with honors, high honors, and highest honors.^[43]

The creation of new academic departments, which had proliferated during the 1960s, slowed, and just one addition—computer science—emerged. Initially a part of the mathematics department, computer science became a field of concentration in 1977, in spite of faculty reservations about such a major in a liberal arts college. Seven years later computer science became an independent department. Religion, which had started in 1973, was the only other new concentration.^[44]

Graduate study, the primary curricular change of the Paschall years, continued to flourish with only a few additions. In 1983 the College began a doctor of psychology degree in a consortium arrangement with Old Dominion University, Eastern Virginia Medical School, and Norfolk State University. William and Mary now offered doctoral work in history, marine science, physics, Education, and law, as well as in psychology.^[45] Three new master’s programs—American Studies, anthropology, and computer science—added to the wide range of advanced degrees already given.

Psychology was but one of the degrees offered in conjunction with other universities. The College maintained several other cooperative degree programs such as forestry at Duke and engineering at Columbia, Rensselaer, Case Western Reserve, and Washington University in St. Louis.^[46]

As the College expanded its offerings, it failed to escape another national phenomenon: grade inflation.^[47] Although William and Mary had prided itself in resisting the trend of awarding ever higher marks, such was not the case. Early in the Graves administration, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences Harold L. Fowler worried about “high grading patterns and lower performance expectancies.”^[48] In 1977 the vice-president for academic affairs, George R. Healy, reassured an anxious faculty that William and Mary was at the national average in grade inflation.^[49] A computer study in August 1985 revealed that from 1971 to 1984 the percentage of A’s and B’s rose from 49 to 53.5—a small but nevertheless measurable increase. A larger change was the drop in the percentage of F’s from 7.6 to 2.7.^[50]

Central to all William and Mary programs was the Earl Gregg Swem Library, built in 1966 as the focal point of the new campus. Under the guidance of William C. Pollard, librarian since 1966, library services became more modernized after 1973 when the College became a charter member of the Southeastern Library Network, which provided on-line connection with the computer at Ohio College Library Center and its vast bibliographic entries. Later, the library became a part of the Libraries On Line system.^[51]

Pollard resigned as librarian in 1977, and a long, acrimonious struggle to find a replacement began.^[52] Finally, two years later, Canadian-born Clifford W. Currie, who had been head of the Ashmolean Library at Oxford University, assumed the post.^[53] Under both Pollard and Currie, the library’s holdings soared, and by 1985 Swem Library housed 804,144 volumes, 408,722 government documents, 595,776 microforms, 9,404 audiovisuals, and 6,134 current periodicals.^[54] Manuscript collections continued to expand, aided by the Distinguished Alumni Papers Project, begun in 1982, and manuscripts soon numbered about 990,000.^[55] Total holdings reached 2.8 million items—up from 1.5 million in 1971. Predictably, a familiar story recurred: the library was soon filled to capacity with ever-increasing collections and numbers of students. The Board of Visitors authorized expansion of the building to include another story, but construction was not complete during the Graves administration.^[56]

Like the rest of the College, the library suffered from austere times, with budget cuts and inflation taking their toll. To help generate private funds, in 1984 Currie organized the Friends of the Library of the College of William and Mary.^[57] Currie retired in the summer of 1985, and the library, as well as the College itself, awaited a new chief administrator.^[58]

In addition to the library, the Graves administration also turned its attention to the entire physical plant of the home campus. The building boom of the 1960s had created a whole new campus at William and Mary, and with Graves came a miniboom. Two new classroom buildings—Richard Lee Morton Hall (1972) for social sciences and Rogers Hall (1975) for chemistry and philosophy—alleviated some overcrowding of classes and faculty offices. The nine-unit Botetourt Residence Complex (1972) and the six-unit Randolph Residence Complex (1980) helped ease the housing shortage for the growing student body. A badly needed Student Health Center (1973) replaced the antiquated infirmary.^[59] In 1983 the first phase of the Muscarelle Museum of Art arose to house the College’s extensive art collections.^[60] The only building constructed off the main campus was the Marshall-Wythe School of Law (1980), located next to the National Center for State Courts on the land the College had acquired from Eastern State Hospital.^[61] Extensive renovations, as well as new construction, upgraded the campus; and a number of dormitories, classroom buildings, sorority houses, Cary Field Stadium, and the President’s House underwent repairs and modernization. The College made many buildings accessible to the handicapped, constructed more parking lots, and built a wildlife refuge.^[62]

As welcome as the buildings of the Paschall and Graves eras were, a number contained a carcinogenic substance, asbestos, commonly used as fireproof insulation. Alert faculty had obtained air samples and pressed the College to take quick action. Spurred by the threat of legal action, the Board of Visitors secured emergency funds, then appropriations from the state, and work proceeded on either removing or encapsulating the dangerous material. In 1983 the asbestos had been contained in the five buildings most seriously contaminated.^[63]

To maintain the historic ancient campus, the College and Colonial Williamsburg had had an agreement since 1944, which was modified over the years. As costs continued to rise, the two institutions agreed, effective on January 1, 1974, to divide the expenses equally, and this policy continued. These agreements were characteristic of the mutually supportive and amicable relations between the two organizations.^[64]

The College acquired, by gift or transfer, several major properties during Graves’s administration. The largest was Jay Winston Johns’s bequest in 1975 of President James Monroe’s 533-acre estate, Ash Lawn, in Albemarle County. This gift also included more undeveloped acreage and a house in Charlottesville, and the entire bequest was eventually valued at $1.3 million.^[65] In 1980 the College acquired 38 acres and six buildings, known as James Blair Terrace (now the Dillard Complex), as a transfer from Eastern State Hospital at Dunbar. Four years later the College received the Goodwin Islands—400 acres of marshlands at the York River, valued at $5 million.^[66] William and Mary not only acquired land, but it disposed of a longstanding albatross: the old College airport, bought in 1933. Graves had tried for years to find a buyer for the 240-acre tract, and finally the city of Williamsburg purchased 30 acres in 1980 and the rest five years later.^[67]

To finance the cost of the physical plant as well as all other College operations, Graves had to cope with sharply curtailed monetary support from the state and federal governments. During this era of widespread economic misery-which included federal wage and price freezes in the early 1970s and subsequent state hiring and salary freezes, cuts in the College’s budgets, and reversions of funds to the state—Graves pleaded with the House of Delegates appropriations committee to restore funding.^[68] To offset the diminishing public moneys, the College turned to other sources. The Board of Visitors raised tuition and general fees sharply.^[69] The expansion of the physical plant was financed by state capital outlay appropriations, state-backed revenue bonds, institutional revenue bonds, and individual donors.^[70] Private and corporate gifts and grants, and federal and state grants and contracts reached $5.8 million by 1985. In spite of this, the College’s debt mounted to $9.2 million.^[71]

In 1972 Graves centralized all fund-raising in a single office and named Warren Heemann to the new position of vice-president for development. Heemann quickly capitalized on the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence to encourage gifts to the “Alma Mater of a Nation.”^[72] In 1976 the College launched a three-year, $19 million development campaign, and so successful was this undertaking that contributions reached $21,405,026 three years later.^[73] To oversee the mushrooming private funds, the College hired two investment management firms, and under their direction, William and Mary’s endowment soared from $11 million in 1971 to $39,262,178 fourteen years later.^[74] Eroding the real value of this impressive increase were skyrocketing inflation and growth of the student body. Although Graves was not optimistic about its possible effectiveness, he also named a Long Range Planning Commission in 1984 to determine the College’s needs and goals for the next decade.^[75]

The Ascent of the Professional Schools

Graves also turned his attention to enhancing William and Mary’s university status, and the professional schools were a sure means to this end. In a time of inflation and high unemployment, more students gravitated toward practical professional education, and colleges throughout the country emphasized specialized career training in professional schools and departments, to the seeming detriment of the liberal arts. William and Mary was no exception to this trend.^[76] During the Graves years, the four professional schools flourished, performed vital public services, and grew in students, faculty, funding, and prestige.

The oldest of these, the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, was established in 1953. Under James P. Whyte, dean from 1969 to 1975, the law school granted the juris doctor and master of law and taxation degrees; published the William and Mary Law Review, held its annual Tidewater Tax Conference for Peninsula attorneys, accountants, and businessmen; awarded the Marshall-Wythe Medallion to outstanding jurists; sponsored a summer program at the University of Exeter; and started a new moot court program. The school established two professorships—named for John Marshall and Dudley Warner Woodbridge—to recognize outstanding faculty. In 1974 the law school began participating in the national Council on Legal Education Opportunity program for disadvantaged students.^[77]

A great boost in renown came in 1973 when the National Center for State Courts decided to locate its headquarters in Williamsburg.^[78] This organization was established in 1971 as a clearing house and resource center for the courts of the fifty states. The College leased to the group a site of about seven acres of the land it had acquired from Eastern State Hospital, and construction of the new building was complete in 1978.^[79]

The proximity of the nationally important headquarters gave added impetus for a new law school building. In 1975 the school very nearly lost its accreditation because of its inadequate facilities, library, and faculty salaries. In fact, according to an American Bar Association (ABA) consultant, William and Mary had “the most inadequate physical plant of any ABA approved law school in the country.”^[80] Graves enlisted the help of Governor Mills E. Godwin and the General Assembly which, in 1976, appropriated funds for site preparation and utilities on land adjacent to the National Center for State Courts.^[81] The law school kept its accreditation because a new building was imminent.^[82] Funds were soon available, and the modern law school facility opened in 1980.

In the midst of the accreditation crisis, former United States Senator William B. Spong, Jr., became dean.^[83] Under his leadership, enrollment reached 515 by 1984, and the number of full-time equivalent faculty, who were the highest paid at the College, rose to twenty-eight.^[84] Reflecting the growing importance and autonomy of the law school, Spong was the only dean allowed to report directly to the president.^[85] The law school soon revived the annual Cutler lecture by an authority on the Constitution, and in 1979, it celebrated the bicentennial of the founding of the Chair of Law and Police at William and Mary, which had been the first such chair in the United States.^[86]

Like the rest of the College, the law school increasingly searched for private funds and established the Marshall-Wythe School of Law Foundation to generate support. Such funds enabled the school to construct a state-of-the-art moot courtroom in its new building, and its moot court teams consistently scored highly in regional and national competitions.^[87] In 1982 additional private money financed the Institute of Bill of Rights Law to encourage scholarly research on the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment.^[88] Other private funds provided for two more endowed professorships, bringing the total to four.^[89]

Recognizing the Marshall-Wythe School of Law’s educational merits, the national Order of the Coif (the equivalent of the undergraduate Phi Beta Kappa) established a chapter at William and Mary in 1981.^[90] Soon the school was named as one of the best in the country.^[91] Such praise was a welcome change from the near loss of accreditation a few years earlier.

William and Mary’s fastest growing school, business administration, was established in 1968 with Charles L. Quittmeyer as dean. Even before the creation of a separate school, the College had begun offering the master of business administration in 1966. Five years later the bachelor of business administration became an undergraduate option. After students completed the arts and sciences academic requirements, the bachelor of business administration curriculum offered two subprograms: accounting and management. The school received accreditation by the American Association (later Assembly) of Collegiate Schools of Business for the undergraduate degree in 1972 and for the graduate degree two years later.^[92] So appealing were the programs that by the fall of 1984, there were 372 undergraduate concentrators and 266 master’s candidates.^[93] Paralleling the growth in numbers of business students, the full-time equivalent faculty doubled to reach forty-one. Like law school teachers, the business faculty earned higher salaries than their arts and sciences or Education counterparts.^[94] The school received an added boost in 1982 when it moved into the old chemistry building, which had been renovated and renamed Chancellor’s Hall. Pleased with the school’s obvious success, Quittmeyer continued to stress the goal of an excellent education in business management.^[95]

Not only did the school train students, but it served the broader business community as well. Directed by Leland E. Traywick from 1967 to 1984, then by Roy L. Pearson, the school’s Bureau of Business Research issued two monthly publications, the Virginia Business Report and the Williamsburg Business Index, and also conducted specialized research studies. In 1975 master of business administration students started the William and Mary Business Review. Nine years later, the business school set up the Center for Executive Development, which sponsored conferences and seminars for business leaders.^[96]

Quittmeyer actively encouraged interest and support from the business community, which was essential to the school’s success. The School of Business Administration Sponsors, Inc., organized in 1970, assisted the school in securing accreditation and then focused on fund-raising. So successful was this group that by 1982 the school had amassed sufficient private and corporate funds for six named professorships and for the Women in Business program.^[97] Tribute to business executives began in 1976 when the school awarded its first annual medallion. The recipient was Thomas J. Watson of International Business Machines.^[98] Students got more exposure to business executives through two programs begun in 1973. William and Mary became one of only eight American colleges selected for the Businessman in Residence program, which featured a series of lectures by a noted member of the business community. The business school also initiated Meet the Presidents day, offering students a chance to become acquainted with chief executives of a variety of companies.^[99] That same year Quittmeyer extended his public relations campaign to generate wider support by setting up small dinners around the state and by speaking engagements outside Virginia.^[100]

When Quittmeyer resigned as dean in 1983, he was succeeded by John C. Jamison. Like the dean of the law school, Jamison wanted more autonomy for the business school, and he was allowed to report directly to the president. Jamison brought new ideas for reorganizing the school and for additional programs, such as the executive master of business administration degree, but most of these significant changes took place after the Graves era.^[101]

The third professional school—the School of Education—had been established in 1961 for the entire Colleges of William and Mary system and was reestablished five years later for only the Williamsburg campus. Under a succession of deans—Richard B. Brooks (1968–74), James M. Yankovich (1974–83), and John M. Nagle (1983–), the school performed the vital public service of training teachers, supervisors, and administrators for the Virginia public school system.^[102] During these years the number of students grew to 110 undergraduates and 363 graduate students, with an additional 219 (mostly school teachers) in the summer session or in off-campus courses, taught by a full-time equivalent faculty of thirty-two. This faculty, like arts and sciences, received lower salaries than those in the law and business administration schools.^[103] When Nagle became dean, he was able to report directly to the president, thus assuring more independence for the school.

The School of Education increased its offerings and devised new degree programs. Undergraduates had to satisfy the liberal arts degree requirements, but the school exercised autonomy in third and fourth year classes and graduate programs. For undergraduates, the school offered a concentration in Elementary Education and certification programs in Secondary Education. For graduates, it provided a wide variety of specialties: master’s degrees in Elementary and Secondary Education, reading, museum education, marine science, counseling, Special Education, educational administration , and school psychology. The school also granted the certificate of advanced graduate study and the doctor of Education in educational administration, higher education, counseling, and counseling–psychology.^[104] All these offerings represented a marked shift to graduate work in Education. In 1973 the School of Education received approval of all its programs by the Virginia Department of Education, and the next year it got its first accreditation by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. Soon the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accredited it as an autonomous school.^[105]

The school further served the community by developing training programs for handicapped preschool children, helping to implement affirmative action, and sponsoring numerous conferences. In 1975 it established a program to help adults improve their proficiency in reading and mathematics, and this later became the Rita Welsh Adult Skills Program. For added accessibility, the school gave evening classes at the Williamsburg campus and at VARC.^[106]

Like its counterparts throughout the College, the School of Education faculty came under increasing pressure to publish more. With Dean Yankovich’s encouragement, the faculty amassed an impressive list of books, journal articles, and presentations of scholarly papers.^[107] In 1985 the school gained added prestige when Armand J. Galfo became Heritage Professor of Education. He was the first to hold such a professorship in the school.^[108]

William and Mary’s fourth school, marine science, was established in 1961 as the academic arm of the College’s cooperative program with the Virginia Commission on Fisheries, and the two organizations jointly operated the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory at Gloucester Point. The next year the laboratory became the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS)—an independent research agency supervised by its own board of administration—but its staff continued to function as the faculty of the School of Marine Science, and its director, William J. Hargis, Jr., was also dean of the school. In spite of a 1967 report by oceanographic experts criticizing the lack of university oversight of VIMS, little changed in the academic or fiscal arrangements. In 1972 a concerned Board of Visitors asked the administration to study VIMS.^[109]

Even after the resulting study described the situation, nothing happened until 1978, when a legislative committee discovered four instances of operating funds being used for capital projects—a violation of state law.^[110] This was too much for the State Council of Higher Education, which quickly recommended that William and Mary become responsible for all marine science in Virginia, notably at VIMS. In 1979 the General Assembly merged VIMS with William and Mary, effective July 1, with the Board of Visitors in full control.^[111] William and Mary had another campus.

State audits soon uncovered deficits for VIMS, deficits that soared to about $5.8 million. As the Board of Visitors began untangling the fiscal morass, it divided the director’s duties by assigning educational and research responsibilities to Hargis and financial and administrative duties to Paul V. Koehly, William and Mary’s internal auditor, who became acting associate director of VIMS.^[112] Hargis soon resigned, and Frank O. Perkins became acting director, then director, of VIMS and dean of the School of Marine Science. Like the deans of the other professional schools, he soon was able to report directly to the president.^[113]

In spite of the internal turmoil, the VIMS staff continued its three-fold mission of education, research, and advisory service. The academic programs, taught primarily at the Gloucester Point campus, included the master of arts and doctoral degrees in biological, physical, chemical, or geological oceanography, marine fisheries science, and marine resource management. VIMS also maintained its Eastern Shore Branch Laboratory at Wachapreague. By 1985 the school’s enrollment had risen from 50 to 105 graduate students.^[114] Teaching these students, as well as conducting extensive research, was the job of a full-time equivalent instructional staff of thirty-seven, whose salaries also lagged behind those of the law and business administration faculties.^[115]

Always research intensive, VIMS concentrated on environmental contaminants such as Kepone, on wetlands and shorelines, and on various shellfish and finfish. As in the past, researchers published voluminously in scholarly journals and presented papers to the scientific community. VIMS attracted research funds from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Other funds came from the national Sea Grant College Program, which had begun in 1968; and in 1984 VIMS received the important Sea Grant College designation—a consortium arrangement with the University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Old Dominion University. Dean Perkins, like other College leaders, searched for private support and established the VIMS Founders Society in 1982. VIMS continued its advisory role in industries such as transportation, development, recreation, and tourism, and to state, regional, and national agencies. Educating the public had always been a major goal, and VIMS increased its media releases, lectures, and programs given to high school, community college, and civic groups.^[116] In 1984 a new building, Watermen’s Hall, opened and housed aquariums and exhibits and made VIMS more visible to the public.

Yet another school—continuing studies—was established in 1968, not as a professional school but as an administrative unit to supervise the extension division, the evening college, the summer session, and the graduate programs at VARC. The School of Continuing Studies had always been viewed with suspicion by the arts and sciences faculty, especially when Dean Donald J. Herrmann had tried to begin independent admissions and degree standards for the school, to award residential credit for off-campus courses, and to require William and Mary faculty to teach these courses. Graves shared the faculty’s apprehension about any loosening of William and Mary’s standards and assigned Vice-President for Academic Affairs Healy to evaluate the situation.^[117] On Healy’ s recommendation, the Board of Visitors approved consolidating the College’s off-campus courses and phasing out the extension division. In September 1972 the Board disestablished the School of Continuing Studies and its extension division.^[118] Years later, then-rector Ernest W. Goodrich and Healy agreed that abolishing the extension division, which had served the Peninsula since 1919, was precipitate.^[119]

Simultaneously, the Board established the Office of Special Programs to help fill the void left by the demise of continuing studies and the extension division and soon named the former dean of students, Carson H. Barnes, as director. Housed at VARC, special programs provided noncredit courses, seminars, and conferences for adults on the Peninsula.^[120] The evening college continued both graduate and undergraduate classes on campus, taught by regular faculty. Undergraduate seniors, as well as part-time adult students, could earn resident credit through this college. But enrollment and interest dwindled, and the evening college disbanded in 1984. The summer session, too, continued to provide additional opportunities, especially for graduate students in Education and business administration and undergraduates in arts and sciences. Enrollment consistently averaged about two thousand students each year.^[121]

To handle the requirements of these various schools and of the whole College, the Computer Center developed rapidly. Raymond W. Southworth, professor of mathematics, directed the center from its inception in 1966 until 1981, when Henry C. Johnson replaced him and the center became Computing and Institutional Research. The center benefitted from the computer science major, begun in 1977, and the separation of that discipline from the mathematics department in 1984. As computers assumed a major place in American life, demand strained the College’s resources, and the systems were frequently upgraded, although William and Mary lagged far behind other state institutions in acquiring adequate computer capability. It did, however, double its computing power in 1984 when it added a Prime Three computer center. Students were the greatest users of computers, followed by faculty, departments, and administrators.^[122]

More Research

During these years research became increasingly important at the College. Early American history had long been the object of intense scholarly inquiry, and William and Mary’s cooperative research and publishing program with Colonial Williamsburg continued at the Institute of Early American History and Culture. Directed by Stephen G. Kurtz from 1969 to 1972, then by Thad W. Tate, the Institute’s research and publication missions flourished.^[123] Scholarly books proliferated, and from 1972 to 1985, the Institute issued forty-three new titles, raising its total to ninety since its publishing program began in 1947. Institute works garnered numerous book awards, culminating in the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.^[124] Under Tate, the Institute strengthened its sponsored conferences and seminars and continued issuing its informative newsletters and handbooks and offering advice and consultation. Simultaneously, staff members continued to teach in the College’s history department and for Colonial Williamsburg’s training classes.^[125] The Institute and the history department promoted their joint graduate apprenticeship in historical editing, and several master’s and first year doctoral students enrolled in this program each year.^[126] The postdoctoral fellowship program maintained its high standards, and in 1984 a National Endowment for the Humanities grant funded a senior fellowship. This grant elevated the Institute’s status to a Center for Advanced Study—one of only eleven in the country.^[127]

The Institute’ s best-known product was the William and Mary Quarterly, edited by Tate from 1966 until he became director in 1972, then by Michael McGiffert.^[128] In 1971 the Quarterly began the Adair Memorial Award, given every four years for the most influential article published in the journal during that time.^[129] Recognized in the scholarly community for its high quality, the Quarterly became one of the most frequently cited journals in the world.^[130]

Special projects assumed greater importance. The Marshall Papers undertaking, begun in 1966 for collecting, editing, and publishing the public and private papers of Chief Justice John Marshall, gained momentum under a succession of editors—Herbert Johnson, Charles T. Cullen, and finally Charles F. Hobson in 1979. With fanfare and ceremonies at the Supreme Court, the first volume of The Papers of John Marshall came out in 1974, and three more volumes followed by the end of the Graves era.^[131] This impressive venture was well under way and constituted a major contribution to American historiography.

A second special project, the Atlas of Early American History, had begun in 1968 with the Newberry Library in Chicago as cosponsor. Former director Lester J. Cappon had left the Institute in 1969 to head the Atlas project, which reached fruition when the Atlas was published in 1976.^[132]

Although the Marshall Papers received some state support, the other projects depended on outside funds. Private funding became more necessary because the Institute experienced the same financial shortfall as the rest of the College, so the director became an effective fund-raiser as well as a scholar.^[133] After Graves left the presidency, Tate remained as director for four more years. Although the Institute had long before established a national reputation as a unique research and publication center, Tate believed it became increasingly important to the College, which was expanding its own research and graduate programs.^[134] The Institute significantly strengthened William and Mary’s university status.

Another research group, the Marshall-Wythe Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, had begun in 1966. Directed by W. Warner Moss, former head of the government department, this institute held conferences and symposia and encouraged interdisciplinary research, but it never lived up to earlier expectations. When Moss retired in 1972, Clyde A. Haulman became director, and the institute finally disbanded three years later.^[135]

An idea that had held such promise when it began during John E. Pomfret’s administration was the University Center in Virginia. William and Mary had been an enthusiastic participant in the consortium with other Virginia colleges, especially in its visiting scholars program, but the economic hard times of the 1970s took their toll on the center as well as on other organizations. The University Center closed in 1978.^[136]

Although the University Center failed, William and Mary was highly successful in its public relations endeavors. The College capitalized on its status as a Bicentennial Campus of the American Revolution and on its theme “Alma Mater of a Nation” as attractions for visiting notables. In October 1976 President Gerald R. Ford and Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter held a nationally televised presidential debate in Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall. In December the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa held its 200th anniversary at the College, where Phi Beta Kappa had been founded. In May 1981 William and Mary conferred its first Honorary Fellowship upon Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. Two years later the College gained wide publicity by providing William and Mary Hall for the international press corps during the Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations.^[137]

The Descent of the Branch Campuses

During the 1960s branch campuses had helped to signify university status for William and Mary, and in 1971 the College had three branches, all established during the Paschall administration. Fourteen years later all had undergone vast changes in function or relationship with the mother College. Christopher Newport College in Newport News had started in 1961 as a junior college and a part of the Colleges of William and Mary system. Ten years later it became a four-year, degree-granting institution with James C. Windsor as president. During the 1970s Christopher Newport expanded its liberal arts curriculum, gave professional training, offered day and evening classes, operated an evening college and a summer session, and took some of the undergraduates from William and Mary’s extension division when that disbanded.^[138]

Located in a rapidly growing urban area, Christopher Newport remained a commuter school and was increasingly attractive to older, part-time students, most of whom worked. Admissions standards remained flexible, but an increasing number of students were in the upper two-fifths of their high school classes. Between 1971 and 1977, enrollment nearly doubled from 1,770 to 3,344, attesting to the college’s success in meeting the Peninsula’s needs. The campus expanded as well, gaining a greenhouse and a campus center.^[139]

But, like William and Mary’s earlier branches in Norfolk and Richmond, Christopher Newport yearned for independence. The first step came in 1972 when the Board of Visitors established the President’s Advisory Council of Christopher Newport, composed of twelve distinguished local citizens. The next year the Board agreed to take the lead in any move toward separation. Graves had serious reservations, however, and wrote that he preferred one board for the two schools because Christopher Newport would profit by the association and William and Mary could be of “major public service” to the Peninsula.^[140]

President Windsor had other ideas. In April 1975 he chronicled Christopher Newport’s “orderly growth” and argued convincingly for independence before the State Council of Higher Education.^[141] Reminiscent of the events in Norfolk in 1961, public opinion rallied behind the drive for autonomy; and private citizens, the college’s Alumni Association and Advisory Council, and the local newspapers backed the idea.^[142] The Board of Visitors took a cautious, neutral stance, agreeing to support any legislative action.^[143] In early 1976 Lewis McMurran, delegate to the General Assembly from Newport News, introduced a bill for Christopher Newport’s independence, and the General Assembly voted to create a board of visitors for that college on July 1, with full autonomy the next year. William and Mary had nurtured still another college to maturity and wished it godspeed.^[144]

Like Christopher Newport, Richard Bland College in Petersburg had come into existence as part of the Colleges of William and Mary in 1961. Blocked by the federal courts from expanding to four years, Richard Bland remained a two-year, commuter school—the only public junior college in Virginia that was outside the community college system.^[145] Uncertainty about this college’s mission and continuing connection with the parent institution persisted, and the William and Mary faculty of arts and sciences called for severing all ties with Richard Bland.^[146] Graves dispatched the College’s chief academic officer, George Healy, to study the situation; and in his ensuing report, Healy recommended a strong effort to upgrade the academic program and a complete shake-up of Richard Bland’s top leadership.^[147] Consequently, Colonel James M. Carson, president since 1961, retired; Cornelis Laban became acting president in 1973; and two years later Clarence Maze, Jr., assumed the presidency. A new academic dean and a different chief fiscal officer completed the administrative restructuring, and the Board of Visitors reiterated its support of the branch college.^[148]

Under Maze’s leadership, Richard Bland renewed its efforts to shed its vocational image and to focus on a two-year liberal arts curriculum for students wishing to earn an associate degree or to transfer to four-year colleges.^[149] It offered three degree programs: associate in arts, associate in science, and associate in science in business. Richard Bland also continued professional programs such as business administration. Enrollment grew from 841 to 979 full- and part-time students with a faculty of forty-six, but admissions standards remained low: Richard Bland accepted 95 percent of high school graduates who applied. To meet adults’ educational needs, the college operated three summer sessions, an evening college, and an extension division, and offered a variety of noncredit classes. It also participated in a cooperative arrangement with the Petersburg General Hospital School of Nursing.^[150] As Richard Bland moved toward an improved academic image, it provided an important service for Southside Virginia and maintained William and Mary’s presence in that area.^[151]

The College’s third branch, the Virginia Associated Research Campus, had begun in 1962 as a cooperative research venture, but by 1969 it had become a campus of William and Mary.^[152] VARC’s activities centered around SREL, a space radiation effects laboratory completed by NASA in 1965. In spite of SREL’s initial success, more modern laboratories at Los Alamos and Columbia University drew away research projects, and NASA’s funding of SREL ended in 1973. Robert T. Siegel, director since 1967, then secured funding from the National Science Foundation and from the state and kept SREL operating until the foundation’s backing ended five years later.^[153]

As SREL’s fate became increasingly uncertain in the 1970s, the College reconsidered its programs at VARC. Under Henry A. Aceto, Jr., director since 1972, VARC’s research emphasis switched from nuclear physics to applied science, and VARC concentrated on biomedical, biophysical, and environmental problems. The gift of a $400,000 Van de Graaff accelerator from NASA aided these research projects.^[154]  VARC’s second mission as a graduate center slowly phased out its degree courses in applied science, business administration, engineering, mathematics, and physics, especially after Old Dominion University withdrew its engineering program in 1978. VARC then became exclusively the School of Education’s off-campus center and also served as headquarters of the College’s Office of Special Programs.^[155]

In 1979 Professor Hans C. von Baeyer of the physics department replaced Aceto as director, and soon a new and exciting opportunity for VARC arose. The next year the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) was established as a consortium, with William and Mary as a charter member, and proposed setting up the Southeast Residential Experiment Station to test solar photovoltaic residential systems. Von Baeyer suggested the VARC site, which won out over several others when the Department of Energy accepted SURA’s proposal in 1983. SURA would build a new laboratory, called the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at VARC. VARC’s property and personnel were moved to William and Mary in July 1984.^[156] Although the College no longer had a graduate campus in Newport News, its physics department had grown in stature because of its prior supervision of SREL and VARC and its affiliation with SURA. The College ended the Graves era with one branch—a diminution of its presence in Tidewater Virginia.

Administering the College

As the branches’ relationships with William and Mary shifted, Graves still had to run the institution, and nowhere were his managerial skills more evident than in his administration of the multifaceted College. He did not share Paschall’ s desire for continuity in leadership and soon replaced key administrators with his own choices.^[157] Reorganizations, new offices, and enlarged staffs drove up the members of Graves’s “team” from 70 in the fall of 1971 to 102 in 1984. Turnover was high: few job holders at the beginning of the Graves era were there at the end, and most were in different positions.^[158]

As personnel shifted, Graves launched a series of reorganizations that changed the shape of the administrative structure. At the top, the office of executive vice-president was terminated when Carter O. Lowance left.^[159] In 1973 Graves abolished the position of vice-president for student affairs when J. Wilfred Lambert retired and then revamped the functions of that office. To stress academic importance, Graves named James C. Livingston, chairman of the religion department, to the new post of dean of the undergraduate program, reporting to the vice-president for academic affairs. Under Livingston, W. Samuel Sadler became the new dean of students.^[160] In 1983 another reorganization changed the position of dean of students to dean of student affairs, reporting directly to the president. The undergraduate dean was downgraded and finally placed under the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. By 1983 the deans of all the schools and of arts and sciences also reported to the president, bypassing the provost, who was the chief academic officer.^[161]

Financial matters, as well as student affairs, received the administration’s attention. In 1972 William J. Carter became vice-president for business affairs, and he controlled the College’s budget for ten years, when Lawrence W. Broomall, Jr., succeeded him. The responsibilities of this office diminished in 1982 because the provost’s office took over budgetary functions.^[162] Financial planning, so important in any business, assumed added significance, and a director of planning and budget worked with the provost. A Planning Priorities Committee and then in 1984, a Long Range Planning Commission exemplified good management practices.^[163]

Of all the administrative changes, none was as crucial as the expanding authority of the vice-president for academic affairs, whose title became provost and vice-president for academic affairs, and then shortened to simply provost in 1983. Filling this post throughout the Graves administration was George Healy.^[164] The provost was not only the chief academic officer; he also controlled the budget and made major personnel decisions. He was Graves’s principal advisor in all matters and also acted as a general troubleshooter.^[165]

Graves’s administrative style markedly contrasted with Paschall’ s hands-on management of all College affairs. Believing that William and Mary was already a good university, Graves brought no plans for revolutionary changes with him. Affable and friendly, he was accessible to faculty, students, and administrators alike. To many, he appeared indecisive; but according to his provost, he was, rather, cautious and deliberative. He avoided confrontation and preferred to let tense situations cool off.^[166] He willingly delegated authority and allowed his subordinates to carry out their duties without undue interference. Although he met often with his vice-presidents, he had no such arrangements with his deans. Instead, in 1971 Healy established a Council of Deans, which met regularly to discuss College issues but had no real power.^[167] This lack of sustained contact with their president caused some deans to feel isolated and shut out of College policy making. Once again, communications became an important issue, as it had with earlier administrations.^[168]

To help with communications, the Administrative Council, established by Paschall in 1968, became the President’s Advisory Council in 1974. Composed of top administrators, the council discussed such matters as building projects, the College calendar, and current College events, but it was ineffective.^[169] Of more significance was a new weekly publication, the William and Mary News, begun in 1972. This organ of the administration kept the whole College community abreast of policy decisions, personnel changes, and major events.

Graves had no trouble communicating with the seventeen-member Board of Visitors, however. He reestablished the practice of issuing annual reports and kept up voluminous correspondence with individual members.^[170] After his narrow election in 1971, Graves enjoyed what Rector Ernest W. Goodrich called a “honeymoon period” when the Board was generally supportive, but the relationship soon deteriorated.^[171] The Board became far less pliable and assumed more control over policy than it had during Paschall’ s presidency. A 1973 revision of the Board’s bylaws allowed the rector to serve two terms of two years each rather than only the one term imposed in 1962.^[172] Three years later, the makeup of the Board shifted markedly, and to the administration’s dismay, new appointees seemed more concerned with football and public relations than with the College’s educational mission.^[173] Soon, two strong-willed rectors, Edward E. Brickell (1978–82) and Herbert V. Kelly (1982–84), effectively controlled the Board’s direction and actions. As a capstone to his increased authority, the rector became rector of the College, not just rector of the Board of Visitors.^[174]

Feeding into the Board’s growing autonomy was the secrecy growing out of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1968 and its subsequent amendments. To circumvent the intended openness of the FOIA, the Board took such steps as preparing “public” reports in advance of meetings and confining important discussions and decision-making procedures to “executive” or closed meetings.^[175] Finally, even agenda for meetings were marked “confidential” or “presidential working papers,” and thus kept from public scrutiny.^[176] The very laws designed to disclose the actions of governing bodies of public institutions resulted in even less accountability.

On the positive side, the Board witnessed two historic firsts during these years. In 1978 Henry T. Tucker, Jr., became the first black ever appointed to the Board. Six years later Anne Dobie Peebles became the first woman rector in the College’s history, and with her came a healing of what had become by then a waning and fragmented College community.^[177]

Big-Time Athletics—Again

Nowhere did the Board of Visitors flex its newfound muscle more dramatically than in athletic policy. Quiescent and under tight presidential control for twenty years, intercollegiate athletics took center stage during the Graves administration, and to the minds of many, professionalized athletics ran amok. Early in his presidency, Graves, along with the Faculty Athletic Committee, had reaffirmed the College’s educational priorities and stressed its amateur status in intercollegiate competition.^[178]

By early 1974 problems with athletic budgets and special admissions for grants-in-aid athletes precipitated the first comprehensive study of both men’s and women’s athletics in thirteen years.^[179] The resulting report outlined two alternatives: Policy Statement and Program One, which de-emphasized intercollegiate athletics, and Policy Statement and Program Two, which strengthened the existing program. With both programs, student fees would subsidize revenue sports during a three- to four-year transition period, when these sports would then be self-supporting.^[180] Graves took the middle road and recommended a policy which did not de-emphasize football but rejected a win-at-all-costs philosophy. Student fees would continue to subsidize athletics until 1979.^[181] The Board of Visitors adopted Graves’s recommendations in November 1974 and soon began pushing the College toward an increasingly ambitious intercollegiate athletic program.^[182] Such expansion got a boost in 1976 with the appointment to the Board of several enthusiasts for big-time athletics.^[183]

The next year the College withdrew from the Southern Conference after forty-one years of membership. To fill the vacuum, the Board soon allied William and Mary with the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I football, in spite of Graves’s opposition to any upgrading of athletics.^[184] But projected deficits raised serious questions about the soundness of the intercollegiate program, and in early December 1977, the College’s Athletic Policy Committee forecast a $400,000 shortfall by 1981–82 and recommended abolishing the football program.^[185] Two months later the Board formally adopted a new policy effective July 1, 1978, that mandated using student fees indefinitely to support intercollegiate athletics, including grants-in-aid. In return, students could attend all home sports events free of charge. William and Mary would join the newly established NCAA Division I-A in football. This division had such powerhouse teams as Oklahoma, Penn State, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Michigan and would possibly require a 30,000-seat stadium for member colleges.^[186]

The College, however, could not provide 30,000 seats for football fans. Its Cary Field Stadium, built in 1935, had only 8,791 permanent seats and 6,018 temporary seats in the end zone and badly needed repairs. The Board authorized renovations for the stadium as it debated how to increase seating capacity.^[187] It decided on a two-stage expansion of the existing stadium.^[188] In October 1978 the governing body authorized a feasibility study, quickly completed by the athletic director, Bernard L. Carnevale, and kept secret for eighteen months. This in-house study concluded that a larger stadium would attract better teams and increase football revenues. In December the Board determined that the stadium expansion was “economically and financially feasible” and voted to begin the first phase of construction. About 11,788 new seats in the west stand and removal of 3,162 temporary seats would result in 20,579 permanent seats for cheering fans at a cost of about $1.8 million, financed with private funds.^[189]

Roars of opposition engulfed the campus. Students had consistently voiced their disapproval of upgrading athletics, raising fees, and then expanding the stadium and had staged several protests to emphasize their opposition.^[190] The faculty, always concerned that intercollegiate athletics would preempt academics, steadfastly opposed upgrading the football program or spending vast sums of money to enlarge the stadium and had passed a series of resolutions reflecting its reservations.^[191] Opposition came from other sources as well. At a Williamsburg city council meeting, concerned citizens protested potential traffic congestion, and the president’s office was deluged with strong letters from students, faculty, alumni, and townspeople. The Student Association council and the Board of Student Affairs passed resolutions against expansion.^[192] During this chaotic month of January, the NCAA decided against requiring Division I-A teams to have 30,000-seat stadiums, so the reason for stadium expansion vanished.

Graves listened to the massive outcry, which mirrored his own well-concealed feelings. When the Board of Visitors met on February 1, 1979, the president advised it to reconsider its December decision to expand the stadium. The Board nearly voted “no confidence” in Graves and approved a statement compiled by football enthusiasts Herbert V. Kelly and Milton L. Drewer, Jr., and strongly supported by members such as Joseph E. Baker and C. Randolph Davis. The College would go ahead with the first stage of the expansion when private funds became available.^[193] The Board had callously disregarded the wishes of the broad College community. Its slap at Graves diminished his later effectiveness, and some saw it as the beginning of the end of his presidency.^[194]

Reaction was instantaneous. Students boycotted classes; many rallied in protest in front of the Alumni House; others held a Save the Charter Day. Some met with Governor John N. Dalton and members of the General Assembly.^[195] Vehement faculty protests aroused the ire of the outspoken football coach, James F. Root, who gave a widely publicized speech castigating “those academic types.”^[196] The speech exacerbated an already-bad situation. The most colorful protest group was the Amos Alonzo Stagg Society, organized in April 1979.^[197] The society tried to block the stadium expansion by such means as a lawsuit and sending representatives to express their opposition to the House of Delegates’ appropriations committee. Although this vocal group did not succeed, it raised even more public awareness. In October 1981 the society was replaced by the Student Committee for Responsible Athletic Policy.^[198]

But responsible policy was an elusive goal. In August 1981 an architectural firm began a preconstruction study of stadium expansion, now estimated at $2.3 million. The new athletic director, W. James Copeland, Jr., repeatedly spoke in favor of the project, although a student poll tallied 87.3 percent opposing the Board’s policy.^[199] The administration watched in dismay as the Board relentlessly charged ahead. Graves agreed with Healy, who “deplored all professionalized athletics in an academic environment” and hoped that the Board would “temper its headlong determination to proceed with the stadium and collectively come to a wiser understanding of the way academic institutions (at least good ones) work.”^[200] Graves firmly believed that big-time athletics had no place at William and Mary but realized that he could not deter the Board. Instead, he devised another roadblock. The stadium, by law, had to be financed with private funds; and Graves, the consummate fund-raiser, could find no donor.^[201]

Suddenly, the need for a huge stadium vanished. In December 1981 the NCAA lowered William and Mary from Division I-A to I-AA, which included more of such comparable teams as the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Richmond and did not require a 30,000-seat stadium.^[202] A short time later, Rector Herbert V. Kelly told the faculty that relegation of William and Mary to Division I-AA was the greatest thing that could have happened to the football program!^[203]

During these years, intercollegiate athletic expenses and student fees to support them rose dramatically. In 1971–72 athletic budgets were $664,469 for men; $15,972 for women. An $88 student athletic fee was higher than at other Virginia colleges.^[204] By 1984–85 the budget for the Men’s Athletic Association had soared to $2,587,682; for the Women’s Athletic Association, to $940,429. The student fee had reached $393.^[205]

The big gainers in athletics were women, assisted by federal law. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited sex discrimination in public educational programs or activities, and a class action complaint two years later opened women’s athletics to more equitable funding. In 1976 the College awarded the first grants-in-aid to women athletes. Later interpretations of the law required proportional per capita expenditures for both sexes, and the resulting leap in funds allowed the director of women’s athletics, Mildred B. West, to field eleven intercollegiate teams.^[206] Nationally known William and Mary became the prototype for creating strong women’s programs.^[207]

Men’s athletics, however, had made even greater strides, and by 1984 the College had thirteen men’s intercollegiate teams and a vibrant intramural program. Bernard L. Carnevale replaced H. Lester Hooker, Jr., as athletic director in 1972 and held this post until W. James Copeland, Jr., assumed it nine years later.^[208]

One revenue sport, football, compiled a lackluster record, in spite of the attention and money lavished on it. James F. Root became head football coach and guided the Tribe until 1980, when Jimmye Laycock replaced him. Root had only three winning seasons, and many wondered how William and Mary football justified a 30,000-seat stadium. After several years of rebuilding, Laycock produced winning teams in 1983 and 1984.^[209] The second revenue sport, basketball, was more successful. Playing under successive coaches in the new William and Mary Hall, this team amassed seasonal records of seven wins, five losses, and one tie over thirteen years.^[210] Of the nonrevenue sports, the cross-country team dominated the Southern Conference for ten consecutive seasons, until 1976, and the indoor track team was equally as successful.^[211]

More on Civil Rights

As the athletic controversy rose to a crescendo, the College, like all public institutions, took steps to end racial and sex discrimination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade racial discrimination and initiated affirmative action to lower the barriers against minorities and women. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited sex discrimination.^[212] To abide by this legislation, William and Mary followed state guidelines, which came slowly because the federal and state governments bickered for years over acceptable policies and procedures.^[213] Finally, in 1978, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare accepted the Virginia Plan, which committed white colleges to enrolling 150 percent more minority students during the next four years, to providing equal employment opportunity, and to hiring black faculty and administrators in proportion to the percentage of blacks earning graduate degrees from Virginia institutions.^[214]

The College had taken the first steps to begin nondiscrimination policies near the end of the Paschall era and expanded its efforts under Graves.^[215] To dispel its image of an upper-middle-class, all-white institution, the College hired several black administrators. In 1971 Juanita Wallace became assistant dean of admissions; three years later Leroy O. Moore became director of minority student affairs, and Wesley C. Wilson was director of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action.^[216]

The College had about forty black undergraduates in the fall of 1971, and Graves advocated energetic minority recruiting but without lowering academic standards.^[217] In 1973 the College adopted a special admissions policy to help meet the educational needs of minorities and soon expanded its scholarship assistance, participated in a program for black law students, and bused blacks to visit the campus. In 1979 it started a four-week summer residential program to help blacks adjust to college life. William and Mary representatives visited high schools with heavy black enrollments and sent out mass mailings.^[218] In 1983 the administration adopted a new plan setting numerical objectives for minority recruitment and retention, and by the next fall fifty-five black freshmen—the largest number ever—entered the College and brought the total of blacks to 135 or almost 3 percent of the undergraduate student body of 4,729.^[219]

If the College’s desegregation of the student body progressed, its affirmative action to hire black faculty did not fare as well. Qualified blacks with terminal degrees were at a premium, and more affluent universities could offer better salaries. In 1971 the College had no black faculty; few were interested in teaching there. One man, however, was intensely interested in a faculty position. In 1974 Jeroyd X Greene, a Black Muslim lawyer from Richmond, applied for a one-year visiting professorship at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law. Dean James P. Whyte, Jr., offered him the job, and Greene accepted. Upon learning of Greene’s six contempt of court citations, the administration tried to persuade him to withdraw his acceptance. Greene refused and threatened to sue the College.^[220]

The Richmond Times-Dispatch aired the story on May 10, and a fire storm of protests erupted. Loud opposition to Greene’s appointment arose from alumni, members of the Virginia bar, and the Richmond chapter of the Society of the Alumni. State Senator Edward E. Willey, powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, jumped into the fray and threatened a large cut in law school appropriations if the College hired Greene.^[221] This unwarranted interference in the College’s internal affairs touched off even louder debates. In the midst of the furor, Alvin Duke Chandler resigned as chancellor of the College, but the rector, R. Harvey Chappell, Jr., denied that the action sprang from the controversy.

Finally, on May 18, the Board of Visitors, which had ultimate hiring authority, accepted Graves’s recommendation not to appoint Greene to the law school faculty because of the contempt of court citations.^[222] Furious reaction came from every comer of the campus. On May 23 William and Mary’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors appointed a committee to investigate the incident. Five days later a law school faculty resolution supported Whyte and deplored outside interference. On the thirtieth the arts and sciences Faculty Affairs Committee expressed to Graves their objections to the decision, and the full faculty of arts and sciences endorsed the committee’s letter. In his reply, Graves took responsibility for his action. In September the AAUP report criticized Graves and the Board of Visitors for violating academic due process in the Greene affair and later, law students circulated petitions protesting the actions of the College. On May 2, 1975, James Whyte resigned as dean.^[223]

All the notoriety over hiring a black faculty member was a major setback for the College’s affirmative action program. There were only two black faculty in 1976; three in 1980 when William and Mary had the lowest percentage (.67) of black teachers of any state university in Virginia.^[224] Each department handled its own hiring, often without keeping records, and many were unaware of any affirmative action guidelines. After Dale W. Robinson became director of equal opportunity and affirmative action programs in 1981, he drew up a new recruitment plan with numerical objectives, but by 1985 there were still only three blacks on the faculty eligible for tenure.^[225]

Affirmative action for equal employment opportunities affected women as well as blacks. In 1978 the College named Linda Collins Reilly as dean of the undergraduate program and assistant vice-president for academic affairs. Other women joined the administrative ranks but, with the exception of Mildred B. West, director of athletics for women, and Dorothy Bryant, the registrar, all remained at the assistant or associate levels.^[226] The number of women faculty ran ahead of blacks but still fell behind their availability in the labor market. A comprehensive report, “The Status of Women at the College of William and Mary,” compiled in 1973, showed that 39 women constituted about 13 percent of the instructional staff of 305.^[227] The Affirmative Action Advisory Committee and later, Dale Robinson worked vigorously to raise awareness of discriminatory hiring practices and to press for better recruiting. In 1984 the College established numerical quotas for hiring women faculty, and a year later their numbers had risen to 51 or 12.5 percent of the faculty of 408—hardly great progress.^[228]

In addition to underrepresentation on the faculty, women also earned lower salaries than their male counterparts. Nationally, women’s salaries were $2,500 less than men’s in 1972, and William and Mary followed this disparity. Of the thirty-nine women of the instructional faculty, only two were full professors, and their average salaries were $2,253 less than male professors’ salaries. The twelve associate professors averaged $1,758 less than men in the same rank.^[229] Amid charges of sex discrimination, Vice-President Healy began a study, and in March 1974 he admitted to Graves that women’s salaries were lower than men’s but that he saw no proof of sex discrimination.^[230] The Affirmative Action Advisory Committee and the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Jack D. Edwards, disagreed with Healy’s conclusion, and simultaneously, two class action lawsuits may have prompted the administration to begin another salary comparison study in late 1974.^[231] The following January, Healy reviewed and raised the salaries of twenty-nine women faculty.^[232]

During the following years, the salary disparity worsened and led to a new round of raises in early 1979.^[233] But the gender gap persisted and in 1984 was about the same as it had been in 1972.^[234] Although equal pay was never achieved, the College had set up the procedures to improve affirmative action and equal employment. Graves, however, remained dissatisfied with the College’s progress.^[235]

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Rebels

Women and minorities were only a small part of the William and Mary faculty, which was dispersed among arts and sciences and the schools of law, business administration, Education, and marine science. By 1984 full-time and full-time equivalent faculty numbered 408; and reflecting the predominant educational mission of the College, the faculty of arts and sciences made up about 75 percent of it. Ninety-one percent of the entire faculty held terminal degrees in their disciplines.^[236] In an era of a glut of doctors of philosophy and a limited job market, stability characterized all the faculties. To unify these disparate groups and to provide a collegewide forum, Graves tried from the start of his presidency to establish a faculty senate, but the faculty of arts and sciences killed the proposal in 1974.^[237]

Guiding arts and sciences, the largest of the faculties, was Harold L. Fowler. Dean from 1964 until he retired ten years later, Fowler steadfastly supported the basic liberal arts mission of the College.^[238] Professor of government Jack D. Edwards followed Fowler as dean and was, said Vice-President for Academic Affairs Healy, “a persuasive and unrelenting advocate for the Faculty he serves” until he returned to teaching in 1981.^[239] Next came a two-year stint as dean by Zeddie P. Bowen.^[240] Edwards returned as acting dean until the chairman of the chemistry department, Melvyn D. Schiavelli, assumed the post in 1984.^[241]

Arts and sciences also had a dean of graduate studies, a position filled by history professor John E. Selby from 1968 to 1981, when physics professor Rolf G. Winter succeeded him. These two deans supervised master’s level work in twelve fields, doctoral programs in three. In contrast to the growth of graduate work in the professional schools, the number of graduate students in arts and sciences was static—259 in the fall of 1971 and 258 thirteen years later.^[242] In 1984 religion professor Thomas M. Finn filled a new post, dean of undergraduate studies.^[243]

To make teaching more attractive, the College recognized its outstanding faculty. Graves named only one Chancellor Professor—business administration professor Leland E. Traywick—but the College continued to award annually the Thomas Jefferson Award and the Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award. William and Mary qualified for the state’s Eminent Scholars Program and could invite eight prominent visiting professors to the campus each year.^[244] Other benefits emerged. In 1972 the Board of Visitors modified its restriction against married couples teaching in the same department by allowing this practice if one spouse was not in an advisory or supervisory capacity over the other.^[245] Six years later the College adopted a policy similar to that of other state universities by allowing faculty and classified employees to take one tuition-free course each semester.^[246] The teaching load edged downward. Although the Faculty Handbook gave twelve hours a semester as the maximum, in actuality most faculty taught no more than nine hours.^[247]

Less positively, in 1972 the Board of Visitors lowered the mandatory retirement age for faculty, as well as for administrators, from seventy to sixty-five, and soon many experienced professors were gone. Ten years later the low-interest housing loans to faculty and staff ended.^[248] Sabbaticals—so long a goal of the faculty—never materialized, but increasing private funds for research permitted more faculty to take paid, one-semester leaves.^[249]

Faculty research took on added importance, and the “publish or perish” syndrome appeared at William and Mary as it did at other universities across the nation. The Faculty Handbook of 1982 stressed scholarly contributions as a criterion for promotion and tenure, and Dean Bowen introduced weighted evaluations which placed as much emphasis on “visible scholarship” as on teaching. To give more recognition to research and publishing, the dean of graduate studies circulated a yearly list of faculty publications and artistic enterprises, and a similar list appeared at the end of the president’s annual reports.^[250]

The Society of the Alumni continued to fund five summer grants, and research grants funded by the College steadily increased. In the summer of 1971, twenty-four faculty shared meager grant money, but soon semester research assignments and minor grants expanded faculty opportunities. By 1984–85 the College awarded thirty-two summer research grants, twenty-one semester research assignments, and fifty-six minor grants.^[251] As during the Paschall administration, federal and state governments, corporations, and foundations provided the bulk of William and Mary’s research money. From 1978 to 1983, for example, there were 383 grants and contracts totalling $29,327,842, with the federal government paying for nearly 80 percent of them.^[252] In 1984 a new $500,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately benefitted twenty-two faculty.^[253] Pressure, therefore, grew to submit research proposals that would land lucrative grants.

Simultaneously, the faculty of arts and sciences felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the College community. In spite of Graves’s reassurances that this faculty was “the heart of the College,” many believed that the administration favored the growth of the professional schools at the expense of arts and sciences.^[254] The deans regularly complained of feeling shut out of decision making and of receiving information only when it was requested. The problem persisted and even the Self-Study of 1984 reported that many faculty felt isolated from the administration and “disenfranchised.”^[255]  Others believed that Graves tried to stifle academic freedom and freedom of speech when, at the height of the stadium expansion controversy, he called three highly vocal opponents of expansion into his office to discuss their “objectivity” in grading football players in their classes—an action perceived by many as intimidation.^[256] The gulf widened between the faculty of arts and sciences and the president, as it had during the Chandler and Paschall administrations.

Another communications breakdown occurred as relations between the faculty and the Board of Visitors deteriorated, especially during the stadium uproar. Most faculty believed that the Board was frivolously wasting money that could be used for hard-pressed academic programs. Aside from the formal contact between the Faculty liaison Committee and the Board, there was little interaction between the two groups. Mutual misunderstanding and suspicion characterized their relationship. In an unprecedented action, Rector Edward E. Brickell appeared at a collegewide faculty meeting in 1981 to assure the faculties that they and the Board had similar goals and aspirations for the College. The next year Rector Herbert V. Kelly brought a similar message. When she became rector in 1984, Anne Dobie Peebles furthered the conciliatory trend.^[257]

Poor communications also played a large role in the faculty-administration dispute over salaries. Graves and Healy had always been aware of the inadequate pay for all the faculties, including arts and sciences, and vowed to make every effort to raise salaries.^[258] A major stumbling block in increasing William and Mary’s notoriously low pay was the College’s peer group status. Healy argued persuasively and successfully before the State Council of Higher Education to approve raising William and Mary from the third to the second peer group. His achievement was, he later said, his “main contribution to William and Mary.” Governor Dalton soon authorized the higher assignment, effective in 1980.^[259]

Low overall pay was not the only complaint of the faculty of arts and sciences. A growing disparity between the salaries of this faculty on the one hand and of the administration and the law and business schools on the other fed the discontent and lowered morale. As early as 1972, Graves found ways to augment law faculty pay, and this trend continued.^[260] The School of Business Administration benefitted from private and corporate donations which it used to boost faculty pay. Simultaneously, the College steadily increased both the number and salary of the administrators.^[261] To help supplement these higher salaries, the administration began using private funds, a practice viewed with suspicion by the faculty.^[262] The administration determined the distribution of the funds, and these internal allocations widened the salary gap and further demoralized the arts and sciences faculty.^[263]

By 1982–83 compensation, in constant dollars, for all faculties was less than it had been a decade earlier. Since 1972–73, average pay had risen 98 percent (from $14,467 to $28,536); the Consumer Price Index, 139 percent.^[264] In addition to rampant inflation, William and Mary’s pay scale was abysmally low by all criteria.^[265] Making the bad situation worse, the General Assembly voted no salary raises for 1983–84; rather, the state would pick up individual contributions to the Virginia Supplemental Retirement System, which amounted to a 5 percent increase in take-home pay.^[266]

In the spring of 1983, the administration allocated $135,000 in private funds to help alleviate these austere financial conditions and adjusted salaries in about one hundred “special cases.” Following the established pattern, the administration and the law and business faculties received far higher per capita raises than arts and sciences. This was necessary, Graves later remarked, to meet marketplace demands. Although Dean Bowen had told his faculty that there would be no money for any raises, he received $85,000 which he distributed among fifty-one faculty, few for actual promotions or tenure.^[267] News of these allocations quickly circulated among the whole faculty.

In the fall of 1983, a College study showed the average salary in arts and sciences was $27,598; in business administration, $33,126; in Education, $28,421; and in law, $36,990.^[268] This information fueled the already-explosive situation. At a special meeting on November 15, called by a petition with 200 signatures, the faculty passed a resolution stating that “in a year … of austerity and common sacrifice, salary increases” were distributed in an unjust manner and represented “a signal failure to recognize” the indispensable role of arts and sciences. The resolution protested large expenditures on noneducational items and urged a reordering of priorities. The faculty discussed taking its case directly to the Board of Visitors, the State Council of Higher Education, and the legislature, but did not act. The resolution quickly made newspaper headlines.^[269]

Healy tried to assuage the rebellious faculty in a letter describing how much less in state appropriations William and Mary received than five other universities and how he had tried to balance salary distributions. He failed to explain why administrators earned such high salaries or his allocation of private funds.^[270] Unappeased, the faculty prepared for its next regular meeting.

On November 29 and before the faculty or the Board of Visitors convened again, Graves and Healy abruptly announced their resignations, effective in July 1985. It was important, said Graves, to have new leadership to implement the recommendations of the self-study, then under way, and of the new Long Range Planning Commission.^[271] Somewhat deflated, the faculty met on December 6 and adopted recommendations that the administration continue to strive for higher faculty salaries and to reduce funding for noneducational activities.^[272]

A few months later, the General Assembly authorized 10 percent faculty salary increases for each of the next two years, and the state would also pay employees’ life insurance premiums. The law and business schools could raise their tuition to boost their salaries even more.^[273] By the fall of 1985, when these increases were in effect, the average salary in arts and sciences was $34,039; in business administration, $42,663; in Education, $33,946; and in law, $53,317.^[274] The old patterns persisted, although at a higher level.

Meanwhile, the lame-duck president soon became eclipsed by the quest for his successor. In March 1984 Rector Anne Dobie Peebles appointed a seventeen-member search committee to recommend three names for the presidency.^[275] As the committee screened its list of about two hundred applicants and narrowed the field to six, then three, Graves announced in November 1984 that he would leave in January rather than July 1985. He had accepted the position of director of the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum near Wilmington, Delaware. Before he left, he bade an informal farewell to the faculty of arts and sciences, which gave him a standing ovation. The Board named Provost Healy as acting president until a new president took office. That new president was Paul R. Verkuil, dean of the Law School of Tulane University, who was chosen by the Board of Visitors on December 20.^[276]

Healy served as acting president from January 9 until July 1, 1985. During these months he juggled the duties of both provost and president, and he neither initiated any new programs nor ignited any new controversies. His main job, he said, was “minding the store.”^[277]

When Graves resigned from the presidency, he left William and Mary secure in its position as a small university serving many of the educational needs of Tidewater Virginia. It could never turn back to its earlier mission of only an undergraduate liberal arts college. Under his leadership, the Marshall-Wythe School of Law and the School of Business Administration grew in stature, resources, students, and faculty salaries. Research and publishing, crucial functions of a university, took on added significance in schools and departments at the main campus as well as at VIMS, SREL, the Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bureau of Business Research. The concept of higher education serving the basic needs of mankind—an idea prevalent in the 1970s—grew stronger. Graves had said when he first became president that the purpose of a liberal education was to “prepare its students to live and make a living.” William and Mary performed public services in such activities as marine advisory, teacher education, consultation in sciences, education, law, business, early American history, cultural programs, and courses and seminars through the Office of Special Programs.^[278]

Reflecting his belief in community and cohesiveness, Graves drew students into the College’s decision-making processes.^[279] He initiated his policy of self-determination, appointed students to various College committees, and was available to students. Although Graves also maintained cordial relationships with the city of Williamsburg and Colonial Williamsburg, this community spirit did not encompass much of his faculty.

The severe economic conditions of the 1970s “marked the end to visions of limitless growth for American colleges and universities,” including William and Mary.^[280] Nevertheless, Graves was able to add five major buildings and two residential complexes to the campus. His most successful accomplishment was fund-raising, and the College’s endowment rose by $28 million, in addition to private funds for building projects such as the Muscarelle Museum.

Graves’s major contribution to the College was, perhaps, stability of purpose. For the first time since World War II, William and Mary’s basic mission did not change with a new president. Graves had no intention of altering the small-university concept that Paschall had begun, and with him came an end to the quest for identity that had characterized the twentieth century College and was still generally prevalent in higher education during the 1970s.^[281]

As an administrator, he knew “how to surround myself with people who were brighter and more talented than I,” Graves later joked.^[282] He avoided confrontation, willingly delegated authority, and allowed Provost George Healy to handle the academic, and later budgetary, operations of the College. His business background and his own inclinations made him more of a manager than an academic leader, and with him came the final transformation of the role of the president from a scholarly leader such as Pomfret to an administrator skilled in public relations and fund-raising.^[283]

In spite of Graves’s obvious successes, some negatives marred his record. When he first became president—perhaps in a precipitate effort to “do something”—he abolished the School of Continuing Studies with its extension division, which had served the Peninsula since 1919. Then, with a “new broom sweeps clean” philosophy, he quickly replaced veteran administrators whose expertise should have been invaluable. Continuity was unimportant. In his effort to improve the professional schools, especially law and business administration, Graves did not press for a concomitant strengthening of the graduate programs in arts and sciences and in fact, seemed to relegate this “heart of the College” to the sidelines. His relations with the faculty of arts and sciences completely deteriorated during the salary crisis of 1983. In an era of lessening presidential authority, Graves lost control of policy direction to the Board of Visitors, which grew steadily more domineering.^[284] After the Board nearly voted “no confidence” in him during the stadium expansion crisis in 1979, Graves had little influence with that body and probably should have resigned.

Graves’s goal for William and Mary had been excellence, which he defined for the State Council of Higher Education as a “commitment to being substantially residential with a strong emphasis on residence halls, campus life, and student organizations, activities, and opportunities to grow, develop, and mature.”^[285] By this definition, he achieved his goal. He also had cited as keys to excellence the necessity of remaining a small, residential university; attracting superior students; strengthening graduate, professional, and research programs; and securing outside funding.^[286] In these areas, too, Graves had helped to build a better university. By utilizing this popular buzzword of the time, Graves left virtually undefined his concrete goals for the College.^[287] Webster’s, however, defines excellence as “superiority,” and William and Mary was a superior college with its unique combination of an undergraduate liberal arts education and select graduate programs. It was not a run-of-the-mill, multipurpose state university but instead, a carefully crafted merger of a solid undergraduate college, a limited graduate university, a public service institution, and a research center. Graves, then, solidified the mission begun by Paschall.

When Graves left the College, private donors established the annual Thomas Ashley Graves, Jr., Award for Sustained Excellence in Teaching in honor of his fourteen years of “selfless service.”^[288] With the selection of the next president, William and Mary eagerly awaited a new era and stood poised on the threshold of its fourth century.