Walker interview

[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Warren: Last question. What about the future? What would you like to see? How
shall we celebrate the 250th anniversary in a way that looks towards the future?
Walker: Well, I really haven't thought about that, but I suppose, to me, it would be
some combination of Bob Dole's bridge to the past and Bill Clinton's bridge to the

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future. Much of what makes Washington and Lee great is what it's been. I think still
the finest qualities of the university are embedded in its past, and its success, I think,
will be how well it's able to marry the things that made it great in the past with the
future.

         The Honor System, you could do away with the Honor System with the stroke of
a pen, and like coeducation, literally, it would only take four years, at most seven years,
for it to be forgotten among the students. The faculty would still remember it, but you
can bring the most radical change in the world to a university and, however awful it
will be for the four years—between the time it takes the freshmen to get through, and
the first day of the fifth year—it's gone for all practical purposes.

         My wife and I were very active in founding an Episcopal high school here twelve
or fourteen years ago, which we merged about seven years ago—this is the school of
which she's now the head—we merged with a non-parochial independent school which
was largely Jewish, but the Jewish-Episcopal thing was not a problem. The problem
was the culture of the two schools. The one we had started was very concerned with
character development and high standards of academics, which is pretty typical of
Episcopal schools nationally. It was designed to be a pretty Episcopal school. And this
other school was heavily characterized or was really run by the families of kids with
learning disabilities of one degree or another, whose attitude pretty much was—the
most important thing was to make the kids feel good about themselves, and discipline
and character-building wasn't particularly important, and academics weren't important
at all. And we merged because we weren't growing fast enough and needed more
space, and they were on the verge of bankruptcy and had a huge campus, and it saved
both schools, but as all the experts with whom we counseled before we merged told us
we were going to, we had an enormous culture clash, ended up in a big lawsuit and
very ugly for a few years.

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         But what led me to this is that, as ugly as it was, and this was a six-year high
school, when the last kid who was there the year we merged graduated, it was palpable,
the change. Now, there were still families who were very involved on both sides of the
issue that had second or third kids either coming along or whatever, and those families
were still in the school, but when the last of the kids left, it's like the institution itself
breathed a huge sighed have sigh of relief and said, "Now I can go on where I'm going."

         And the same thing, I think, is true at W&L. You could change anything you
wanted to tomorrow, including the name, and four years later, leaving aside the effect
of alumni and whatnot, the school would go on without a hiccough, assuming people
kept coming, but it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't have W&L's strengths anymore.
It seems to me, in retrospect, that the university gave up little when it took women. The
place today, the traditions, even the things that were most male about it, the heavy
drinking, hard partying, that hasn't changed. It hasn't changed a lick. In fact, if
anything, it may be more so than it was then, because the girls don't go home now at
two o'clock in the morning. They stay and party all night.

         But I think that W&L, in coeducating, has maintained most of its most loved
traditions, and the ones, I think, that most shape student life, certainly, the Honor
System being prime among those, but the gentle air of civility, of caring, of a gentility,
to the extent it's any different from civility, and what I would hope for the future is that
however the world changes, which it undoubtedly will, and the university is going to
have to grow with it, that it will always keep looking over its shoulder and redefine for
each generation in a way relevant to that generation those qualities that have made it
what it was for so long.

         Nothing lasts 250 years without having some essential goodness or some
essential strength to it, and however you define those strengths, if they were
abandoned, then the place could die as easily tomorrow as some place that was only
started a year ago. And I think the university's been pretty successful through the years

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at redefining itself to change with the times. And I think there are tough times ahead. I
said earlier, to the extent I have pessimism in my life, I'm saddened and feel that society
is somewhat threatened by the general breakdown in civility, that people in general just
aren't as nice as people used to be. I think there are probably a lot of good reasons for
that, and it will be a great strength of W&L if it can preserve that and keep turning out
people who are reasonably civil, even if they're just slightly more civil than the average
members of their generation, because the world needs civil people, desperately, I think,
more than we needed them thirty years ago because there are fewer of them.
Warren: There's no question that it's one of the most civil places I've ever been,
Washington and Lee.
Walker: And the world doesn't like that, and the world isn't like that. Go to Duke. The
world is not like Washington and Lee. And thank God for the Washington and Lees.
Warren: That's real true. Well, I've taken up enough of your day. I really have enjoyed
myself. Thank you so much.
Walker: Well, it's my pleasure.
[End of interview]

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