Traditions and Trendlines

In 1904, Congress amended the University charter to ensure that the school would always be secular and to change the name to The George Washington University. In 1912, GW began to move to Foggy Bottom after buying (with a heavy mortgage) a building at 2023 G Street and another across the way at 2024.

The name change was significant. It put the University back on the road toward being the national university that George Washington had hoped for in the capital city. In a way, so did the new location since Foggy Bottom was just a couple of blocks north of the site Washington thought would suit the University. The move to Foggy Bottom turned out to give the University more, though not infinite, room to expand, certainly more than it had on H Street where land and properties were very expensive. Neither the new name nor the new location produced dramatic results right away.

But this era of change is a good place to forgo a chronology of GW and to look instead at various characteristics of the University over time—at the traditions, trendlines, and traits that have contributed to making GW what it is today. Some characteristics have been enduring. Some others were interrupted, never to be seen again. Still others were established, vanished, and then returned many years later.

Old Campus, No Campus, New Campus
A college campus is more than a fashion statement. Imposing Gothic quadrangles and charming Georgian brick mansions have a great deal of eye appeal and certainly convey a message. But however lovely, architecture is wallpaper or background. What goes on inside the buildings is more significant. And where those buildings are and how they relate to the needs of students may be, as the combined history of Columbian and GW illustrates, the most important characteristic of all.

Columbian College was all campus. It sat on 46 acres on the top of College Hill, now called Meridian Hill. The southern side of the property was a steep slope running down to Boundary Road. It was in the countryside with a formidable hill keeping the still distant town of Washington at arm’s length. It had only a few buildings for classes and for student and faculty housing on all that land. Both the president and the steward of the College had garden plots from which they could feed themselves and students, and sell produce to make extra money.

It made sense for the Union Army to commandeer the property during the Civil War. There was plenty of space for barracks, tents, hospitals, and stables—and besides, everyone had always agreed that it was a particularly healthy spot, which would benefit the recuperating wounded soldiers.

The healthy isolation may have been good for convalescence, but it did not help the educational enterprise: it was a school, after all, not a sanatorium. The move downtown, consolidated around 14th and H Streets in the 1880s, strengthened Columbian, now a university. It put the undergraduate college next door to, or around the corner from, its professional schools. It also signified a profound change for the next century of Columbian’s and GW’s history.

The downtown campus was sitting in one of the toniest business neighborhoods in Washington. The land was too expensive to build dormitories for students and housing for faculty on campus—but in truth there was no campus. The University’s buildings were adjacent to office buildings and shops. Columbian had moved swiftly—and no doubt jarringly—from pastoral to urban in the course of its move downtown.

Changes of this kind and magnitude can have a destructive influence, but the opposite proved true. Columbian had one of its most secure periods because it moved downtown just when a new pool of students became available to them.

The government workers, and many others with short workdays and time on their hands, wanted to further their educations. Columbian was within walking distance of the offices where these new “late-afternoon students” worked. And near the offices from which Columbian also recruited professionals in many fields to teach part time. The great Walter Reed lectured on medicine, Associate Justices of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan and David Josiah Brewer lectured on law (each for nearly 20 years), and many other eminent professionals lectured in “the late afternoons” on many subjects at Columbian. In other words, Columbian went from being pastoral and residential to being urban and commuter—and from having exclusively a stable faculty to relying as well on what we now call adjuncts. This was a profound change, and a change for the better in Columbian’s fortunes. It could not have happened on College Hill.

But better didn’t last downtown. By the early years of the 20th century—after the Baptists had briefly returned (in 1898) and then departed forever (in 1904) and after Columbian’s charter was amended to make it a secular institution called The George Washington University—the school nearly went broke. Times were tough, and the University was spending more than it took in. The Law School wound up in the attics of a Masonic temple a couple of blocks away, now the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The H Street properties, except the Medical School’s building, had to be sold. The non-campus migrated from its grand building on H Street to a series of row houses on Eye Street. In just a generation, Columbian/George Washington had gone from being urban and compact to being urban and disheveled.

In 1912, GW bought the former St. Rose’s Industrial School, previously an institution for “young girls who were mostly orphans from good families.” The building was at 2023 G Street in Foggy Bottom, and GW used it for its arts and sciences departments. The process of relocating GW was gradual. World War I intervened, and raising money to acquire property was, as usual, a painstaking and often painful process. The professional schools remained across town; the Law and Scientific Schools moved to Foggy Bottom in the 1920s, and the Medical School came to Foggy Bottom in 1973. It took 90 years to reunite all the divisions of the University on one campus.

The idea of a campus was still arguable for more than 20 years after beginning to move to Foggy Bottom. GW had acquired some green space, the University Yard, but the school was still a number of buildings scattered around G, H, and I Streets. Most of the students were still commuters. The first dormitory was built in the late 1930s. A gift from Hattie Strong, the building was intended for women students only. The men lived in rooming houses or fraternity houses and, in the case of the commuters, took the streetcar to class after work. Even in the late 1950s, a student handbook began thus:

Well here you are at GW and you’re
probably wondering: What campus?
True, we keep it carefully camouflaged,
but it’s here—the only concrete campus
in captivity.

It has taken decades for GW to fill in its campus, a kind of dented square running roughly between 19th and 24th Streets and from Pennsylvania Avenue to F Street in most areas, while dipping to Virginia Avenue and E Street in a couple of blocks. It has taken decades as well to acquire more open space, including Kogan Plaza, Veterans Park, and Anniversary Park, and many little gardens and green refuges.

But it remains urban and, an echo of its happy period around H Street some 120 years ago, compact. An easy 10-minute walk takes students, faculty, and staff from one end of the campus to another, from classrooms and offices to laboratories and libraries, from theaters and bookstores to residence halls or restaurants. The sidewalks and streets belong to the city, but they have a university quality about them. One of GW’s great amenities does not belong to the University or even to the city of Washington: it is the Foggy Bottom/George Washington University stop on the Metro subway that still brings commuters to GW and connects everyone at GW to the rest of the city and the ever-growing Washington suburbs.

The University has claimed its own territory, but it is territory in and of Washington. It does not face in on Gothic quadrangles or shut the doors of Georgian mansions. It opens out into the streets, making the city available to its students and faculty and the University available
to Washington.

This could not have happened on College Hill.

The City’s School
A self-serving act can turn out to be of greater service to others. The origins of GW’s tradition of learning and service in the city of Washington prove this surprising point.

Columbian moved downtown in the 1880s. The trustees of the school had been flirting with the idea for more than 20 years (to the extent Baptist ministers were capable of flirting at all). When they decided to sell College Hill and move to H Street in Northwest Washington a couple of blocks from the White House, the reason they gave was the large number of young men living in Washington who wanted to improve their fortunes in life by studying law—
balanced by the large number of government lawyers and other professionals eager to teach. Turning out ministers and generally well-educated young men was not providing enough income to sustain the College; the new market of underemployed young people, mainly in government service, was the self-serving temptation they yielded to in order to ensure the survival of the institution, now a university. They and their professors were “the vast permanent endowment” that made up for an inadequate cash endowment.

Their bet on the appeal of the law paid off. Many young men came to Columbian to study the law; then as now, both official and civilian Washington had a voracious appetite for lawyers. What may have surprised Columbian was the appeal of many other studies—of the arts and sciences, medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, jurisprudence and diplomacy, and engineering. Columbian grew because all its departments were attracting part-time students whose late afternoons ran until 8:30 and sometimes until 10:00 at night. The cost of tuition was low. Columbian found itself serving and educating young men—and beginning in 1888, a few young women—who were already living in Washington and were looking to further their educations and their professional and social prospects.

Columbian’s dependency on these students was nearly complete. For example, the School of Dentistry, alarmed by a downgraded accreditation, feared that the Surgeon General of the Army would remove all the service men studying dentistry, which would put the school out of business.

These new students filled the classrooms—and saved the substantial expenses of recruiting students and of fund raising. At the turn of the 20th century, Columbian was almost entirely an evening and night school, the exceptions being some undergraduate courses in the arts and sciences that were taught during more standard academic hours. In the early 20th century, President Charles Willis Needham nearly destroyed what had recently become The George Washington University by trying to do away with part-time studies; he thought them undignified and thought as well he would have an easier time raising funds for a school with full-time students. His efforts failed—and the University nearly did, too. But over time, evening enrollments grew again.

It is important to remember that the distinction between undergraduate studies and studies in professional schools was not as stark as it is today when a BA is a requirement for advanced study. The professional schools varied in their requirements—the Medical School typically required an undergraduate degree or at least some undergraduate study. The others might accept preparatory school training, but the Law School, for example, did not require a bachelor’s degree until 1936. These, however, were not GW’s terms, but rather the terms of the times.

And in these terms, GW provided the professional educations—and hoped-for advancement—that many living in Washington would not have otherwise had. This service continued for many years. A story from the Depression of the 1930s can serve as a good—and typical—example.

A young man, a poor kid and the son of immigrants, found himself in New York fresh out of high school and looking for a job. The line for an opening for a clerk at Macy’s wound around the block twice. He left discouraged. But some time before, he had applied for a job at the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission. A letter arrived offering him a position as an “assistant messenger,” essentially a coffee-getter and an errand-runner. He took the job, came to Washington, and looked around.

He found GW, and in 1939 joined the historic army of part-time students as an undergraduate. He ultimately studied full time (but still commuted on the streetcar since there were no dormitories and he could not have afforded to live in one). He left GW in 1943 for the Navy, was present at the landing at Anzio and other places (where, he observed, “someone could get hurt”) and returned to GW after the war on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1948. After graduation, he got a job in one of the local industries, the Foreign Service, and worked there many years before retiring.

GW gave him the opportunity he needed—and took advantage of—once he got to Washington. His choice of career was to some extent certainly determined by proximity: the State Department was right there and was hiring after the war. But this too is important: the same story could be told thousands of times. From the move downtown in the 1880s through the Depression and well into the 1950s, many young men and women acquired undergraduate educations and degrees on very similar terms and in very similar circumstances.

That is no longer the case for undergraduates. Of GW’s some 9,500 undergraduates, only about 300 are studying part time. But graduate study is different and still belongs to the older tradition. Of 11,000 graduate students, almost half study part time, especially in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business and Public Management, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Education and Human Development. All the other graduate and professional schools have some part-time students.

The mission is the same as it was 120 years ago on H Street: to present courses of study for enlightenment and professional advancement. And, once again, the terms are the terms of the times. Graduate and professional degrees are the keys that open doors in contemporary society—in private business, in civil services, in the military, in non-profits, all of which bring more and more people to live in and around Washington and pursue further education. GW, like Columbian, still thrives on the presence of these students just as they thrive and learn and advance because of their studies at GW.

Schooling the City
Teaching and learning have always extended beyond the classrooms of Columbian and GW and into the city of Washington. Columbian had a preparatory school from its earliest days, which suffered the same ups and downs as the College, but which often had a larger enrollment. By all accounts, it was a good school. In 1848, the Columbian trustees proposed accepting the most advanced students from the city’s public schools so that they could benefit from a superior curriculum. The tuitions were paid by the city’s School Fund, making this effort a pioneering experiment in what we now call school vouchers.

After the Civil War, the District of Columbia did not support any public high schools. At the time, a high school diploma was considered perfectly adequate preparation for careers in banking, business, and most professions; it was a terminal degree, but valuable and prized. Without public high schools, only families well-to-do enough to afford tuitions in private schools could give their children the advantage of what was then considered a complete education. Considering the substantial growth of population during the years after the war, this meant many young people were educationally disenfranchised.

Columbian’s preparatory responded to this problem by admitting “worthy and gifted youths” from the public schools, their ways to be paid by special endowments and gifts. Making high school available, even to a comparatively small number of Washingtonians, was of significant value to the city and an earnest of the College’s (and later the University’s) commitment to the city that gave it a home and sustained it.

The preparatory school closed at the end of the 19th century, but the tradition of bringing education into the city has continued. Perhaps the most influential GW figure in education was Dean William Carl Ruediger. Before World War I he established, and then maintained for years, a demonstration school for student teachers at 20th and F Streets. He was said to have trained more than half of the teachers in the Washington public schools. Today, students in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development follow Dean Ruediger’s model by teaching full time at the District’s public Cardozo High School; they teach literacy and technology, tutor students, and most significantly open their students’ eyes—and minds—to the future possibilities awaiting them in Washington with trips to the World Bank, museums, and naturally the GW campus in Foggy Bottom.

As time went by and a university degree became increasingly important, GW began to find ways to make higher education available to its neighbors. During the Depression, when even the most modest fees were beyond the means of many students, GW granted additional scholarships to young people recently graduated from high school. This tradition continues, and GW contributes more financial support to graduates of District of Columbia public schools than any other university in America. In 1989, GW set up the 21st Century Scholars Program, later renamed by the Board of Trustees the Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Scholarship Program in honor of Trachtenberg’s 10-year anniversary at GW. It provides full scholarships—covering tuition, room, board, books, and fees—worth more than $170,000 over four years to academically talented graduates of the city’s public high schools. As of this writing, some 68 young men and women have entered the program, with about half having graduated. The University also matches scholarships awarded by Fannie Mae to students in the city’s H.T. Woodson High School and provides scholarship support to students at Eastern High School as well. GW has pledged financial support to a group of graduates from Paul Junior High who meet GW’s academic standards and need additional financial aid beyond other grants and programs. Faculty and staff contributions to the DC Scholarship Fund provide financial assistance to GW undergraduates from the city.

Having achieved George Washington’s goal by becoming a national university in the nation’s capital, GW remains as well what it has always been—the city’s school and a place for the city to learn.

Healing the City
In the first part of the 19th century, few medical schools operated their own hospitals or had an affiliation with a hospital operated by some other organization. The study of medicine was not always very close to its practice; practice came later. This also was an ambiguous period in the development of medicine—the era, for example, of the invention of anesthesia and the rise of phrenology.

The Columbian medical faculty began operating the Washington Infirmary in Judiciary Square in 1844 and did so until 1861, when it burnt to the ground (but it had already been commandeered for the war). It was the first general hospital in Washington and thus Columbian was among the first American medical schools to have a teaching hospital of its own.

At that time, hospitals were mainly for the poor who could not be treated at home; doctors made house calls on the well-to-do. Having a teaching hospital put the medical faculty in touch with the sick of Washington and also began the tradition that still exists of giving charitable care, as it was called in those days, or uncompensated care as it is called today.

After the fire, the Medical School had no hospital until the preparatory school on H Street closed and was turned into a hospital; it was next door to the Medical School and began admitting patients in 1898. From that time until the present, the University’s hospital has had a first-rate reputation for clinical training.

This reputation and the emphasis on clinical work further exemplify the mutual benefits the city and the University have provided to each other for more than 180 years. The sick and disabled of a growing, bustling city came in great numbers to the hospital for treatment—often provided to them at no cost. The physicians practicing in the hospital, consequently, had the opportunities to refine and expand their clinical skills in many branches of medicine. And the varied maladies of the patients and the skills their physician-teachers applied to them combined to produce a remarkable environment for students learning the practice of medicine and to train one generation after another of highly competent, resourceful doctors.

A new University hospital opened in Foggy Bottom in 1948. It had been planned and begun during World War II, largely underwritten by the federal government because there was no facility large enough or modern enough to handle the city’s caseload. GW, with its tradition of service to the city and its central location, was the natural choice for this investment.

The great traditions continued in the new building. Third-year medical students, still studying on H Street, spent most of their third years in “hospital clerkships,” rotating through departments and dealing, as a University historian has said, with an “astonishingly diverse array of patients,” thus acquiring a broad and deep experience in clinical care. And the hospital’s willingness to treat all comers, regardless of insurance or ability to pay, also endures. In 2002, the GW University Hospital provided $17 million in uncompensated care.

That same year, the hospital got a new home—right across the street from the old one and right above the Foggy Bottom subway stop. Again, GW medical students will be working and Washington patients will be treated in the most modern general hospital in the city.

Studies
Columbian College at first had two departments. The Classical Department taught history, belle lettres, rhetoric, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, learned languages, and mathematics. The Theological Department taught divinity, pulpit eloquence, Biblical language and literature, ecclesiastical history, and Christian discipline. There were three professors and a few tutors. Medicine and law were added soon after.

GW now has nine schools and a total of 93 departments and 78 research centers and institutes offering many different programs and courses of study. The course listings in the undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools fill some 420 pages in four separate bulletins. Teaching these courses requires a full-time faculty of slightly over 1,000 and adjunct faculty of about 600.

Over the years, the curriculum has changed. The Theological Department was never as popular as the Baptists had thought or hoped and it had withered away by the time Columbian moved downtown. Pulpit eloquence and moral philosophy are nowhere to be found in the lists of courses offered at GW—and we may only wonder what Luther Rice and President Staughton in 1821 would have made of courses in sonography, sports law, African humanities, or the anthropology of gender. In fairness and with historical perspective, however, we might wonder how faculty and students would have reacted to these same courses in 1960.

But at the time the Theological Department was disappearing, the Law School returned, the Corcoran Scientific School, the forerunner of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, came into being, and diplomats were lecturing on diplomacy, preparing the ground for the Elliott School of International Affairs. Other schools and courses of study arose to meet a demand, but expired when the demand vanished or the schools could not sustain themselves. Thus, the Schools of Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine closed in 1921, the Nursing School in 1931, the School of Library Science in 1941, and the School of Pharmacy in 1964. The rise and fall of courses reflect the world in which the University lives—and always will.

Students
The students who came to study belles lettres and Christian discipline at Columbian were all male, white, and Christian. They were mainly from the South—even as late as the 1940s the University had a Southern character that the Northern students noticed immediately, though this may have been partly a reaction to the city of Washington itself. As late as the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy described Washington as a city “of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.”

Columbian remained all male for more than 60 years. The first woman admitted as an undergraduate was Mabel Nelson Thurston, in 1888. The Medical School had admitted four women in 1884, then closed to women three years later because coeducational instruction in medicine placed “a strain on modesty.” While the Law School did not deal with naked bodies or other unmentionables, it observed in 1887 that training women for the law was “not required by any public want.” A generation later, in 1913, the public want was evidently visible, and women were admitted to the Law School. Today, women outnumber men as GW undergraduates, graduate students, and medical students. They are about even in numbers with the men in Law School.

GW remained white until the 1950s. The Law School had admitted some black students during Reconstruction, but the practice did not last. The city, of course, was segregated: Lisner Auditorium, as a public accommodation, was closed to African American performers and audiences. Howard University across town seemed, in the eyes of GW administrators, to provide any kind of education a black student might want. Moreover, the University was in a city that had parallel public schools for black and white children—separate but unequal in the decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. To its credit, GW decided to admit blacks in 1952, two years before the Brown decision, mainly because GW offered graduate programs not available at Howard. Today, about 25 percent of all GW students are members of minority populations. In fact, in 2003 Black Enterprise magazine ranked GW 24th among the best 50 colleges for African Americans.

The appointment of a non-Baptist as president in 1871 and final departure of the Baptists in 1904 probably did little to make the students less dominantly Christian. But the formation of a chapter of the Menorah Society in 1915 signaled an important change in GW’s student population. GW does not keep religious statistics, but the existence of campus organizations of virtually every religion is evidence of a truly open, secular University.

Neither the city nor the University strikes anyone as particularly Southern any longer. Washington may be the southern anchor of the eastern megalopolis, but outwardly and intrinsically it is less Southern than Baltimore, its neighbor to the north. Nearly two-thirds of GW students come from the New England and Mid-Atlantic states; only one student in eight is from the South. Every state is represented on campus, as are the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Some 130 countries send 2,000 students to study here; the Asian contingent is the largest, dominated by students from China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

GW students today look no more like the first students of Columbian than the Foggy Bottom Campus looks like College Hill. GW looks like Washington and America today—diverse in every imaginable way, and open, secular, and internationalist.

Faculty
The original Columbian faculty’s capacity for work, and for shifting gears quickly, was astounding—all those different courses and only three professors. The needs of the “late-afternoon student” produced the “late-afternoon professor,” the specialist. The trend towards specialization has simply permeated all of American academia, and GW’s faculty is made up of specialists in all the fields that 93 different departments and 78 research centers and institutes require.

It also is a distinguished faculty. In recent years, GW professors have been Fulbright Scholars, won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, have been editors of learned journals or book series, have won fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (our neighbor in Washington), have had grants and a “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation, have had Guggenheim Fellowships, and have had grants from the American Council of Learned Societies.

This list is not complete—nor do awards alone give the measure or reveal the scope of all first-rate research and teaching conducted on campus and, in practice, around the world by GW’s faculty.

Alumni
A large contingent of Columbian’s early graduates went forth and did exactly what the Baptists had hoped—they became ministers and missionaries. The second largest cohort became physicians, reflecting the importance of the Medical Department at the time. But most of Columbian’s graduates returned home after finishing their studies. That did not happen because Columbian was a national university, but rather because Washington was still a very small city until after the Civil War and opportunities for work were not abundant.

The growth of population after the war and the subsequent move downtown changed the relationship of Columbian alumni to the city. Many of its students—especially the “late-afternoon students”—were already government employees. They came in great numbers to study law and, shortly afterward, science and engineering, medicine, and other subjects because they were here and wanted to advance their careers or their prospects. It is a shame that there are no reliable statistics about the number of Columbian—and later, GW—alumni who earned their part-time degrees and stayed on to live and work in the city. But the number must have been substantial and the number of lawyers who learned law here must have created one of the largest professional old-boy networks that even Washington has ever seen.

As GW has become a national research university, it is normal to expect that its graduates would be dispersed everywhere across the country and around the world. And so they are. But as GW has grown, so has the city of Washington. Today, there are about 60,000 GW alumni living in and around Washington. Some of them are famous, others ordinary citizens. All of them, each in their own ways, contribute to the health, growth, and wealth
of the region.

Many GW alumni have prominently made their mark in—and often left their mark on—Washington and its immediate area. Here is a small sampling: Gen. Billy Mitchell, pioneer of military air power (BA ’19, “as of the class of ’99”); John Foster Dulles, secretary of state (LLB ’12); his brother Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence (LLB ’26, LLD ’59); Senator J. William Fulbright, longtime chair of the Senate foreign relations committee (LLB ’34, LLD ’59); J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI (LLB ’16, LLM ’17, LLD ’35); Leon Jaworski, special Watergate prosecutor (LLM ’26); Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, former first lady and book editor (BA ’51); Syngman Rhee, late president of South Korea (BA ’07, LLD ’54); and Julius Axelrod, Nobel laureate and neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health (PhD ’55, LLD ’71). Two GW alumni (in addition to Colin Powell) have been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Gen. John Shalikashvili (MS ’70) and Gen. John Vessey, Jr. (MS ’66). Gen. Merrill McPeak (MS ’74) is a former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, and Gen. Charles Krulak (MS ’73) is a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Many alumni are still active in and around Washington, including: Abe Pollin, philanthropist and owner of the Washington Wizards (BA ’45); Raymond J. Oglethorpe Jr., former president of America Online Inc. (MS ’69); Ellen Malcolm, founder and head of EMILY’s List (MBA ’84); Nick Paleologos, president of Miller and Long (BS ’69); Mary L. Schapiro, president of NASD Regulation (JD ’80); Rowland Evans, syndicated columnist and TV commentator (AA ’51); Michael Mossetig, senior producer of the PBS “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (BA ’64); Peggy Cooper Cafritz, president of the D.C. Board of Education (BA ’68, JD ’71); David A. Longanecker, assistant secretary, U.S. Department of Education (MA ’71); Colin L. Powell, secretary of state (MBA ’71); 12 members of the United States Congress; 17 past or present American ambassadors, including Charles T. Manatt, former ambassador to the Dominican Republic and chairman of the GW Board of Trustees (JD ’62); Harry L. Carrico, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia (AA ’38, JD ’42, LLD ’87); Joyce Hens Green (JD ’51, LLD ’94) and James Robertson (LLB ’65), both judges on the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; and Kenneth W. Starr, former solicitor general and independent counsel (BA ’68).

The Sum of the Parts
A small college and a large university are made up of many things—of books and blackboards, of bricks and mortar, and of men and women. The courses of study have changed and changed again since 1821. So have the buildings of the various campuses. And so too have the students, faculty, and staff as little Columbian with 11 students became GW with about 20,000. Nevertheless, the modern GW still remains the sum of its parts—its courses of study and research, its physical plant, and the population of the University community.

The traditions and trendlines in this section have documented some of these activities and how they have altered over the years. They give a sense of how the terms of the relationship have changed among the University’s parts and how, as well, the relationship of GW to Washington has changed. The next section presents how GW’s presence and the activities of its students, faculty, and staff continue to have an influence for the good on its one and only hometown.