Picture a 1693 royal charter from King William III and Queen Mary II founding this college in Williamsburg, Virginia. Its stones and lawns belong to the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the ninth-oldest in the English-speaking world. Today it is a public research university classified among R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity.
It was one of the original nine colonial colleges. Walk these paths and you follow reforms of 1779, when James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other reformers transformed the school: the Divinity School was abolished, the first university-affiliated American law school was established, and the curriculum was modernized. William & Mary was among the first American institutions to offer graduate instruction, and it was the first to adopt an honor code in 1736.
Students here founded the F.H.C. Society, known as the Flat Hat Club, in 1750, and Phi Beta Kappa followed in 1776 as the first Greek letter fraternity. The university now comprises six schools, and the main campus spans 1,200 acres. Notice the 1,200-acre campus that carries all of that history.