Citizenship

Washington and Lee’s director of institutional history and museums helps the university take full advantage of its rich history as one of the nation’s oldest higher learning institutions. The director leads the process of envisioning and developing a museum that explores the university’s past and its intersection with many key events, movements and figures of American history. Additionally, the director manages all assets, facilities, resources, staffing and strategic planning associated with the W&L’s historical galleries and collections. The director collaborates with faculty, museum staff and students to support research projects, educational programming, curricular development and exhibitions and teaches and lectures on topics related to institutional history.

Washington and Lee’s history includes meaningful connections to our nation’s history. The new Museum of Institutional History will advance the university’s educational mission by illuminating these connections and telling our unique stories, including those of our namesakes and the many other individuals and events that have shaped W&L. This endowment will support programming and exhibits that tell the university’s story from multiple perspectives.

The Special Collections Department in Leyburn Library is a place for inspiration, learning and research. The existing physical environment remains a vibrant space for engaging the campus with rare and archival material that facilitates education and research across the liberal arts curriculum. This endowment will support development and preservation plans for Special Collections that enable new acquisitions of specialized materials and the conservation of priceless and signature pieces.

Washington and Lee is fortunate to own a significant museum-quality art collection composed of paintings, sculptures and other works from the 17th to the 21st centuries. The university displays many of these works in the Colonnade, the Ruscio Center for Global Learning, Lewis Hall, Wilson Hall and other public spaces, and faculty have begun to incorporate the study of the artwork into their courses. The university is in the process of upgrading storage space and currently has a modest annual budget for preserving its collection. An endowment to support conservation efforts will allow W&L to expand these efforts, focusing on artwork that forms the collection’s foundation, including the Vincent L. Bradford Collection, bequeathed in 1884.