Washington and Lee University (Washington and Lee or W&L) is a private liberal arts university in Lexington, Virginia, United States.
Washington and Lee University is the alma mater of three United States Supreme Court
Justices, a Nobel Prize
laureate, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Emmy Award, as well as 27 U.S. Senators, 67 U.S.
Representatives, 31 state governors, as well as numerous other government
officials, judges, business leaders, entertainers, and athletes.
Several well-known alumni include Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, United States Supreme Court
Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.; United States
Senator John Warner from
Virginia; United States Solicitor General
John W. Davis,
Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States
during the 1924 presidential election; author
Tom Wolfe, founder of New Journalism; broadcast
journalist Roger Mudd; artist
Cy Twombly; voice actor Mike
Henry, explorer Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis
and Clark Expedition; Federal Judge and Civil Rights Champion John Minor Wisdom;
and billionaire Rupert Johnson, Jr. of Franklin Templeton
Investments.
Archives of the papers of notable alumni and other resources relating to the
history of the university may be found in the manuscript collections at
Washington and Lee's James Graham Leyburn Library. Publication of the 1995 guide
to the collections was made possible by a grant from the Jessie Ball DuPont
Fund.
Today the university has about 2,000 undergraduate students and 315 in the
School of Law. Both the undergraduate and law schools are in the first tier of
the U.S. News & World Report
rankings for national liberal arts colleges and law schools, respectively. In
the 2016 guide, the undergraduate college is ranked number 14, amongst national liberal
arts colleges and the law school is ranked number 42nd nationally amongst all
law schools. The 2015 Forbes magazine college rankings place W&L
29th. Kiplinger's Personal Finance
had the college atop its 2016 list of the 300 best college values, one spot
above its number two ranking in the 2015 list. In 2015,
The Economist
ranked Washington and Lee first among all undergraduate institutions in the
United States in terms of the positive gap between its students' actual median
earnings ten years from graduation and what the publication's statistical model
would suggest. Of its findings, the newspaper wrote that "No other college
combines the intimate academic setting and broad curriculum of a LAC [liberal
arts college] with a potent old-boy network."