Parents and Family
A Message from the President
If we do our job, your son or daughter will fall in love at Washington College. I don't mean romantically, although I'm always pleased when I go to alumni gatherings and find that many of our graduates first met their spouses on our campus. No, I'm thinking not about "who" our students will fall in love with, but about "what." Will they fall in love with history, or literature, or chemistry, or political science? Will they find a passion, something they want to dedicate the rest of their lives to pursuing?
We expect our faculty members to be accomplished teachers and scholars, but we're especially interested that they have a passion for what they do and that they want to communicate that passion to their students. There's plenty of skepticism and cynicism in the world; we want our students to be constantly in contact with people who believe that biology, or anthropology, or music is worth caring deeply about, worth devoting one's professional life to, worth loving. And we want that love to be contagious; we want our students to be infected with it.
St. Augustine believed that we human beings are drawn to what we love. Just as our bodies become what we eat, over the course of our lives our souls become more and more like what we love. May your daughter or son find a life-sustaining passion here and pursue it.
— Baird Tipson, President
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