Academics
About the Creative Arts at Washington College
Unlike its few elders in American higher education, Washington College sprang from neither an ecclesiastical nor a courtly tradition. While Harvard and Yale, for example, emerged to train ministers, and William and Mary to train gentlemen, this College aimed from the start to train thinkers and doers in a new nation. Naturally, the arts took center stage. Eighteenth-century curricula included drama, public speaking, drawing and painting.
Those roots can be felt and seen in this, our 225th year. Student actors, directors and technicians often run more than 20 productions in 8 months. Art and music students learn traditions and practice craft in classrooms, in studios and on stage. And the creative writing program — among the nation's first for undergraduates — nurtures student writers, supports them with special scholarships, and honors an outstanding senior every year with the largest undergraduate literary prize in the world.
The College has also staked its future, in large part, on the arts. A $24-million performing arts center will debut at the center of campus in the fall of 2009. And the Rose O'Neill Literary House, long a haven for literary life on campus, has a new burst of energy as a center for literature and creative life.
Set alongside the Chester River in historic Chestertown, Washington College is emerging as a bustling creative center, a meeting place for artists, scholars and intellectuals. Continuing a 225-year-old commitment to the arts, the College nurtures original, playful, clear and forceful thinking and expression. While creativity can't be bestowed, it can be taught, by creating an environment that rewards risk, nurtures authenticity and exposes young minds to the promises of a creative life.
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