Word: hampden
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...homecoming day at Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, and the playing field, ironically called Death Valley, is alive with the old-fashioned spirit of amateur competition. No TV cameras or pro scouts here. Sprawling on the sidelines, students and alumni sip beer, bloodies and bourbon as the home-town Tigers are tamed 7-6 by the Generals from Washington and Lee. It seems a perfect postcard of an all-American scene. But look a little closer. A few details are amiss. The pep band in the stands has only male members. There is not a curvy cheerleader in sight...
Welcome to a world where only men are usually welcomed. Hampden-Sydney (enrollment: 770) and Washington and Lee (1,332) are among the nation's oldest colleges. The first was established six months before the Declaration of Independence; among its founding fathers: James Madison and Patrick Henry. The second, dating from 1749, was endowed by George Washington himself and later headed by Confederate General Robert...
...alter a thing." Academically that is true. What most of the five schools did do, however, was to sell prospective students and parents harder on the traditional virtues of the small, all-male college. Among them: a teacher-student ratio of 12 to 1 or better, a conservative curriculum (Hampden-Sydney was the last U.S. college to drop its classical language requirement) and sport programs in which, as W. & L. Admissions Director Bill Hartog puts it, "you don't have to weigh 250 pounds and run a four-second 40-yard dash to play football...
...those who really fought the last U.S. war, or so it seems in the creative mind of Novelist Josiah Bunting. The Compellas, Robertson and Lemming are fictional characters from Bunting's superb story of that sad war, The Lionheads, written in 1971. Last week, on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he is president, Bunting updated his characters and their concerns. In these odd times the novelist's eye may tell us more about our emotions than the purveyors of polls...
...Viet Nam, and as a major taught at West Point. He left the Army with feelings of sympathetic frustration over watching good men fight a useless war in the wrong way. He became president of Briarcliff College, wrote another novel (The Advent of Frederick Giles), and moved to Hampden-Sydney in 1977. His time is spent now with his students, and with Brahms, Carlyle, and a strong spirit still to be savored among those Virginia hills, Stonewall Jackson...