<p>William & Mary was doubtless a “top 5” college in the 18th century here, when there weren’t many more than 5 colleges in existence. Virginia was certainly a top 5 colony, and W&M was its college. But, even though we like to pretend otherwise, being a top American college then was not such a big deal. Colleges were very local institutions educating a tiny number of men, basically training upper-class clergymen and serving as a finishing school for their pals. W&M, however, had two major problems in the 19th Century: First, it seems to have misplayed the fashions for secularism and science, and therefore been outflanked and then eclipsed by the University of Virginia. And then it spent the second half of the century – when the modern American university system essentially was born – sitting on the sidelines, bankrupt, and only intermittently educating anyone. So by the turn of the last century it was barely relevant.</p>
<p>If you want a handy little guide to academic prestige for universities at the outset of the 20th Century, look at the charter members of the Association of American Universities. (And then look at who else joined, and when. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good index of mainstream prestige.) It was convened in early 1900 by the presidents of Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Berkeley, and the additional initial membership consisted of Clark, Cornell, Michigan, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale. Of those, only Clark has failed to remain in the top ranks of American academia. (Clark withdrew from the organization a little over a decade ago, and it has recently forced out some other members who hadn’t stayed up to snuff.) Note that the founding group excluded some relatively ancient universities – W&M, Dartmouth, Brown (which joined not much later) – and included others that had graduated only a few classes at the time – Chicago and Stanford. Age and prestige were not synonymous.</p>