As we hear often about how William & Mary is a “preeminent public research university1,” we’re losing touch with our cherished identity as an intimate place where students, faculty and staff gather to build scholarship and community. “The College” might seem to be just a pair of words, but they mean something to us.
At some time circa 2014, W&M stopped using “College” to refer to itself, except in its most formal occasions — because of the Charter — or its least formal, in theory a nickname akin to Stanford’s “the Farm” or UVA’s “Grounds.” In practice, this “nickname” has been seldom used in the years since.
These decisions are smoothing out the unique things about W&M, one after another, to make us look more like the rest of higher education
They are laying the groundwork. In 2017, the Alumni Magazine published a feature on the way Thomas Jefferson’s honorary degree highlights W&M’s dual nature as both College and university, followed later that same year by a letter from then-President Taylor Reveley that states, “In my judgment, the Alma Mater of the Nation would benefit quite significantly from calling itself what it actually is – a university – while calling its undergraduate program what it has been since creation, the College…”
The Flat Hat joined the debate in 2019 with an editorial about W&M’s branding guidelines that said “Do we really need to waste effort convincing prospective students that we’re a university when we obviously attend one?” One excerpt especially resonated here at The Gale: “it’s awfully silly that so much time and effort have been devoted towards shedding our reputation as a “college” … the administration’s insistence on designating our institution as a “university” as we enter a series of bold fundraising initiatives project an image of deep insecurity.”
This earned a response from the administration in A passion for consistent William & Mary style: “It is up to each member of our community … to decide how they refer to William & Mary. Our hope is they see the importance and value in being consistent with how we talk about ourselves while also ensuring the outside world knows this is a leading university…” But, six years later, do they?
Most recently, in 2025, W&M renamed the Faculty of Arts & Sciences to the College of Arts & Sciences (after also spinning off the new School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics), in keeping with Reveley’s letter. This is a move meant to “strengthen [A&S’s] identity,” whatever that means.
We see all this as a pattern that in fact indicates the opposite. These decisions are smoothing out the unique things about W&M, one after another, to make us look more like the rest of higher education. And it’s not working. It’s an institutional identity crisis, and a misunderstanding of what the College of William & Mary is.
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- *We do not dispute in the least that W&M is a College that is, in fact, a university. What W&M must again become is a university unembarrassed to call itself a College. ↩︎
