Why "Report back"?

On March 30, 1869, Robert E. Lee, the former Confederate general and then-current president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., recommended to the trustees that the college offer 50 scholarships yearly "for young men proposing to make printing and journalism their life work and profession." This recommendation was immediately put into effect as part of Lee's effort to add practical training to liberal arts education to help the South recover from the Civil War. It was the first mention of journalism instruction at any college in the world. For the next nine years, the program combined general education at Washington & Lee University, as it was called after Lee's death in 1870, with daily apprenticeship work at a newspaper print shop in Lexington.

Reid Hall currently houses the W&L journalism department.

This vision was revived in 1921 when the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association resolved to "reestablish and endow the Lee Memorial School of Journalism as a tribute of the editors of the South to the Founder of Journalism as a learned profession." Allowing for a touch of hyperbole in this wording, it is a fact that W&L's current Department of Journalism and Mass Communications grew directly out of that commitment and $50,000 donated by Southern newspaper editors. Today, our department is the only accredited journalism program at a top-tier liberal arts college and, by this historical record, the first journalism education program in the world.

The program at W&L started a chapter of Sigma Delta Chi -- the old name of SPJ -- as early as 1929. It was the only professional organization for undergraduates, and it was a lively club. Aside from luncheons and banquets featuring prominent journalists, on Presidential election nights it collected and reported the returns on a huge blackboard for campus and community, and every year it helped put on the convention for the Southern Interscholastic Press Association. This SIPA, founded at W&L in 1926, brought as many as 500 editors of high school papers and their advisors to Lexington for conventions through the 1940s.

Today, W&L's journalism department is at the forefront of using multimedia technology to teach both the theory and practice of converged news reporting. We have state-of-the-art facilities in the handsomely renovated 1904 Reid Hall. Our faculty includes endowed chairs of ethics and business journalism. We are the home of the Institute on Ethics and Journalism, which been held 44 times over the last three decades, and we are pleased to host this year's Spring Conference for Region II of the Society of Professional Journalists. Welcome!

Sources: "The Lee Memorial Journalism Foundation," C. Tom Garten (Lexington: Journalism Laboratory Press, 1942); The South and its Newspapers, Walter C. Johnson and Arthur T. Robb (Chattanooga: SNPA, 1954). Photo courtesy W&L Department of Journalism and Mass Communications.