Washington and Lee Launches Effort to Increase Pay, Grants
By Jay Conley jay.conley@roanoke.com 981-3114
Washington and Lee University has unveiled a 10-year strategic plan designed to increase grants for students with financial needs, boost faculty salaries, enhance academic programs and renovate the Lexington-based school’s campus.
The plan, called “A Liberal Arts Education for the 21st Century,” calls for raising millions of dollars in donations over the next decade to reach its goals.
“We’ve spent almost three years working to produce a plan of this sort,” said W&L Provost Tom Williams. “A lot of it has to do with understanding what we can afford to do over that time period.”
A key part of the plan includes offering more grants to students who are qualified academically to attend the school but can’t afford the tuition, currently about $34,650.
“It is seeking to financially enable some students whose family incomes would make it very difficult to attend a place like Washington and Lee,” Williams said.
The school also wants to retain its faculty by making salaries for W&L’s law professors and undergraduate instructors competitive with other schools’.
Williams said the initiative is estimated to cost about $66 million.
Half of those funds will come from a gift in March of $33 million in matching funds from H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, a philanthropist who is a 1953 graduate and former trustee of W&L.
School officials also estimate it will cost between $40 million and $60 million to renovate the Colonnade, a group of buildings that form the central part of W&L’s campus. The Colonnade was built between 1820 and 1842 and was last renovated in the mid-1930s.
As for academic programs, the school wants to launch new undergraduate programs in Latin American studies and the Middle East, as well as enhance leadership and ethics programs and establish a third-year “Bridge to the Profession” program for law students.
On the Net: strategicplan.wlu.edu/strategicplan.pdf
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