Fishburn interview

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Warren: This is Mame Warren. This is tape two with Bob Fishburn on the 4th of July
1996, in Lexington, Virginia.

         You have been a newspaperman, right? That's been your profession. And you're
in the neighborhood. So surely you've kept an eye on this whole coeducation issue as it
developed at Washington and Lee.
Fishburn: And you want me to comment on that.
Warren: I'd like to hear what your perceptions were.
Fishburn: You want me to stick my head in the lioness' mouth. No, I'm kidding.
Warren: I'm interested in what you thought at the time and what you think now.
Fishburn: I will admit to having some misgivings ten years ago. I had a sneaking
suspicion that a certain president was brought in to accomplish this, a suspicion that has
been confirmed. Being something of a traditionalist, I was thinking, "Is there any way
we can do this more slowly, because this is a great change, and can we do it kind of
slicing thin slices of the cheese?" Then I realized that was ludicrous. If we were going
to do it, we had to just go on and do it.

         I heard the probably apocryphal stories about what they were going to do with
the bathroom facilities around campus when they realized they didn't have enough
bathrooms for the women, and the story went around that they just decided to put

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potted plants in urinals and make them into ladies' facilities. I don't know if that's true
or not, but it makes a good story. So I had misgivings.
Warren: Make them easy to water.
Fishburn: Yeah, it would be easy to water. [Laughter] I want to tell you a Churchill
joke after we cut it off.

         I had misgivings. The prep school I went to went coed some years back. I think
in my mind I could justify Washington and Lee's going coed much more than I could
prep school, because prep school seems to me to be a particularly vulnerable time in a
young person's life, and I think I can still say that there's a justification for having this
sexual cocoon I've been talking about in prep school. But then I decided there was
absolutely no justification for it in a college, because most of the people who go to
college are more mature than I was, so they don't need this cocoon.

         So I became, I guess you would call it, inured to it. I didn't really know how
things—I mean, I watched it from a distance and I saw the boisterous masculine
reaction to it when it first came about, you know, better dead than coed and all that
kind of foolishness. It really wasn't until I did a very short stint as a substitute teacher
over here in the journalism department that I realized that the whole tone of the place
was just different. I talked to the professors at that time and, to a person, they said that
it was just, as far as academics, as far as classroom attentiveness, decorum, level of
discussion, it was a far different, far better place. I made the typical remarks about, you
know, hell, they're taking over everything. Are we going to be able to keep our little
leather chairs and our own dens, etc., etc., which was part jocular but partly an early
reaction to it.

         Now I guess I'm enthusiastically in favor of women at W&L, because I've seen
what a difference it's made in, I think, the tone on campus. I know there have been
some problems. I do hope, though—and this is just my caveat. I do hope, and maybe
it's a distinction without a difference, but I do hope they still, for the foreseeable future,

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bill Washington and Lee as a men's college that admits women, for the people for
whom that is symbolic. I think it would save a lot of wear and tear on some of the
alumni, and try to keep it as even as possible, because if you go totally gender neutral
or gender blind, it would be 60-40 women or 75-25 women, because they just simply do
better. I won't say they're any smarter, but they do better on SATs, they're more driven
at a younger age, they mature faster, they take their responsibilities more seriously at
that age. I've talked about late bloomers. It seems to me that too damned many men
are late bloomers. They don't get it until they're twenty-four or twenty-five. Women
don't have that problem. So if it were totally open, I think it would be a predominantly
female institution, and I'm not sure, I think it would be strong academically, but I think
we'd lose something in the process.

         I don't want to get into specifics about what we might lose, because I couldn't. I
just have a vague feeling of uneasiness about Washington and Lee being predominantly
female. So that's a job for the word merchants and the spinners [phonetic] and Bill
Hartog, and all I can say is, I wish them luck. But so far, I don't think anybody can say
that it hasn't been a tremendous success. There are some things about it I wish had
happened differently. I do think it was a power play on the part of the board.
Warren: Take me back to that time, because I assume you were covering it.
Fishburn: I wasn't covering it, no. I was an editorial writer, and I'm not sure I ever
commented on it. I don't think I would have commented on it on the editorial page
because I was too close to it. In a very pale way, it was kind of like Justice Marshall not
commenting on the VMI.
Warren: Justice Thomas.
Fishburn: Clarence Thomas, because his son was at VMI. I felt, as an alumnus, I really
shouldn't get into anything like that, because I might take some prejudice into it. So I
don't think the editorial page ever commented on it one way or another, nor do I think
the Roanoke Times and World News covered the politics of it or the mechanics of it to any

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degree. What little I know about it is just really based on rumors, so I wouldn't want to
go any more than that.

         But I do think it's well known that John Wilson came in determined to take it
coed. There's nothing wrong with that, because they needed a strong person to do it,
and he seemed to be the one to do it. They were very successful, and I think, as I say,
by and large—I don't mean by and large. I won't even put that in there. I think it has
been a very good thing for the university.
Warren: Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
Fishburn: No. I could get philosophical and talk about liberal education, in general.
Warren: Oh, please do.
Fishburn: I get very wistful about that.
Warren: Do you have a handkerchief with you? If you do, we're all right.
Fishburn: No. One of the things I read an awful lot about, and I consider myself a little
bit of an amateur I don't even want to say expert, but if I'm caught up on my reading on
anything, it's on education. I've read a lot of definitions of what a liberal or liberal arts
education amounts to. One of them goes something like it teaches you to entertain
yourself, a friend, and an idea, which I've always liked.

         But I think the definition I have come to understand, which sounds so
highfalutin, is that a liberal education, liberal in the classic sense of the word as opposed
to conservative, but a liberal education teaches you about the lifelong process of
learning. I didn't really understand what that meant until I sort of caught fire during
the navy and started reading for pleasure, of all things. Again, I was a late bloomer, but
I think that it's still a good definition of the education process, and I credit, or blame,
Washington and Lee for giving me something of that, some insight into that process.
And it is a process. It's a never-ending process, and it is probably, next to my family,
the biggest joy I have in my life, and as far as I'm concerned, it was because of W&L.
That's it.

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Warren: That's a pretty nice wrap-up. You are a man of words. Thank you. This has
really been a delight.
Fishburn: Thank you. I hope you got something out of it.
Warren: Oh, I can already see it on the printed page.
[End of Interview]

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