Viewpoints: Behind the new name at Mary Baldwin

It’s now Mary Baldwin University, but it’s more than a name change from Mary Baldwin College.

“Today was the public metamorphosis of what we have created and built,” said Dr. Pamela Fox, the president of Mary Baldwin University, in an interview on WVPT Viewpoints that aired Wednesday night.

Earlier Wednesday, the school, founded in 1842, marked the formal change in name from Mary Baldwin College, but the old name had already fallen behind the reality of what was happening on the Staunton campus.

With more than 1,700 students enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate programs, Mary Baldwin had in essence outgrown the college nomenclature several years ago.

The Board of Trustees at Mary Baldwin initiated a review of the name that considered at the outset even the long-standing tie to the namesake.

In the end, Fox said, it was determined that “the Mary matters.”

“We claim her and her heritage. We claim Mary Julia Baldwin as James Madison, as Thomas Jefferson, because her legacy in educating women, in educating individuals in the Commonwealth, bears that same kind of significance. So really, it’s her spirit that gives the DNA to the institution, and it’s that spirit that unites today, across the 175 years,” Fox said.

So with the decision made to keep the Mary in the name, it came down to a matter of, college, or university?

“What we realized is that there’s this whole category of higher education in the United States that we call the small university, which doesn’t want to be twenty or thirty thousand students, but wants to maintain that focus on students, on teaching and learning, on that enriched experience for the undergraduate,” said Crista Cabe, the senior vice president of university relations at MBU.

American vernacular tends to refer to post-secondary education as college, but the technical difference between a college and university comes down to the offerings in graduate-level programs.

Mary Baldwin offers graduate and doctorate programs, so it has been a working university in that sense.

The name change reflects that reality, and also helps convey the broadening of the mission with the addition of male students in the school’s adult degree and online education programs.

“We have more students in our co-educational adult, graduate and online programs than we actually have in our college for women. And yet people think of Mary Baldwin College as having an identity as a women’s college. So the switch to Mary Baldwin University helps us convey to the men who might be interested in what we have to offer that they are in fact welcome,” Cabe said.

The new name, Fox said, reflects “what the institution is today.”

“Certainly we never stop looking toward the future. We are announcing already some new initiatives. But it is a really important legacy of the past. That’s why have kept the Mary,” Fox said.

Story by Chris Graham