The Educator

Washington College inaugurated Robert E. Lee as its eleventh president on October 2, 1865—the same day he signed an oath of allegiance to the Union, fulfilling his June 13, 1865, amnesty application to President Andrew Johnson. After a lifelong military career, Lee devoted his last years to education. In letters to his son George Washington Custis Lee and to General P. G. T. Beauregard, Lee explained that he regarded this effort as a national, not a Southern, cause.

A Modern Administrator

Lee’s fame immediately drew students and national attention to Washington College. Unlike most college presidents of his day, he did not teach: “There is an art in imparting…knowledge, and in making a subject agreeable to those that learn, which I have never found that I possessed…” Instead, he was an active administrator. Attuned to new ideas, Lee advanced modern professional studies along with the traditional classical curriculum.

Making a Modern University

Traditionally, Washington College taught the classics. Under Lee’s leadership, the school began to adopt newer educational concepts that had emerged in the previous half-century. Most of the innovations were practical courses—“useful” for rebuilding a society—to complement the liberal arts. After only two months in office, Lee petitioned the Virginia General Assembly for funds to support professorships in chemical, mechanical, and civil engineering, physics, modern languages, and history and literature. By 1869, even as his health declined, he and members of his faculty were planning schools of commerce, agriculture, and medicine. The same year, Lee incorporated the Lexington School of Law into the college and established the first school of journalism in the nation. He also worked to establish a department of astronomy and an observatory.

Criticism and Praise
Lee’s bold educational plan drew attacks and applause. While Superintendent Francis H. Smith of the neighboring Virginia Military Institute termed it “twaddle from beginning to end,” the New York Herald declared Lee’s practical education “likely to make as great an impression upon our old fogy schools and colleges as [the general] did in military tactics upon old fogy commanders in the palmy days of the rebellion.”

The Loss of Lee

Upon Robert E. Lee’s death on October 12, 1870, the trustees renamed the college in his honor. But without his leadership, Washington and Lee University immediately confronted challenges.

Custis Lee was elected to succeed his father. He served as president of Washington and Lee University for twenty-six years (1870–1896) but could not sustain the momentum that his father’s international stature, persuasiveness, and administrative abilities had initiated. The innovative schools of commerce and journalism had to be dropped until the next century; the school of medicine never materialized; and the opportunity to establish a school of astronomy with a world-class observatory slipped away.

Despite the trials of those decades following his death, as an educator, Robert E. Lee had laid a firm foundation for the university he helped create, upon which successive 20th-century presidents built.

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