Story of Umw

Date published: 2/10/2001

BY JEFF BRANSCOME

DR. WILLIAM B. Crawley Jr. considers the University of Mary Washington his family.

He's been at the school for 39 years, or almost 40 percent of its history.

So it's fitting that Crawley, UMW's institutional historian and distinguished history professor, wrote an 834-page book titled "University of Mary Washington: A Centennial History."

His wife, Theresa, is a Mary Washington College alumna who has been president of UMW's alumni association.

"It's sort of been our life," said Crawley, whose office wall is covered with pictures of students. "We don't have any children."

Crawley doesn't have anything bad to say about UMW, but his book touches on sensitive subjects, including disagreements among administrators and faculty and a controversial column in UMW's student-run newspaper, The Bullet, called "Sexclamations."

"The man on the street is never going to care about reading this," Crawley acknowledged.

But UMW employees, alumni and students told him they've found it interesting, he said.

Long-term project

Crawley began working on the book in 1988, when he interviewed Lewis Walker, who was MWC's first rector after the institution ended ties with the University of Virginia.

He said he really picked up the pace during a sabbatical in 2005.

UMW Rector Nanalou Sauder recently e-mailed Crawley, telling him she started with the book's account of William Frawley, who was fired as president after being charged with drunken driving twice in two days.

"I think you have been very fair and accurate in your assessments of events that I know about," she wrote. "That tells me that those qualities pertain to the coverage of those events I don't know about."

It wasn't easy writing about Frawley, Crawley said, but he needed to tell the story.

"It was very tough to deal with because, obviously, it was a very sad time," he said. "But I felt like it was significant, certainly an aberration of the history of the place."

He said he read every Bullet from about 1968 to the present to get a sense of what happened on a weekly basis.

"That sort of formed the backbone of it," he said.

Dr. Edward Alvey Jr., a former dean of MWC, wrote a history of the college from its founding in 1908 until 1972. Crawley compressed most of that period to 60 pages.

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Date published: 2/10/2001