Welcome to Robert Welch University
Robert Welch University was founded to provide “a place where responsible young men and women could go to receive a fundamental education in the accumulated knowledge of history, science, literature, and languages, which we, heirs of all ages, have inherited.”
As a major step toward that objective, in 2005 RWU launched an online two-year associate’s degree program certified by the State of Wisconsin. That successful program is now on hold while support and curricula are developed for a full four-year degree program in Americanist studies with special emphasis on the classics. RWU has and continues to support other educational programs, seminars, and research.
Robert Welch
Robert Welch understood that the best way to see into the future was to understand how we arrived at where we are today. In order to accomplish this he envisioned a traditional Liberal Arts college where young men and women would be educated in the same classical tradition as America’s founders.
Robert Welch was born on December 1, 1899, in rural Chowan County, North Carolina. An uncommonly gifted youth, Robert Welch learned to read at age two with the help of his mother, who was a school teacher. By age four he knew his multiplication tables, and by age six was proficient in algebra. At age seven, young Robert began learning Latin and also read all nine volumes of Ridpath’s History of the World, a sweeping account of world history as admired for its depth and scope in the nineteenth century as Will and Ariel Durrant’s multi-volume world history is in our time.
Robert was schooled at home by his mother until age ten, when his parents decided to enroll him in high school. Robert so astounded the local high school principal with his grasp of mathematics, Latin, English, and history that he was enrolled as a high school junior, even though he was still a ten-year old boy.
At age twelve, Robert Welch became the youngest person ever to enroll at the University of North Carolina. While at the university, Robert Welch developed a passion for languages, and mastered both French and German sufficiently well to read literary classics in the original. He also became an accomplished chess player and displayed an exceptional aptitude for mathematics. Robert developed a lifelong passion for scholarship that informed everything he did. He became a successful businessman and world traveler, as well as a husband and father. He amassed a personal library consisting of more than five thousand volumes, most of which he had read. Robert Welch dreamed of setting up a liberal arts college, where young Americans could be educated in the same classical traditions as the Founding Fathers. Robert Welch passed away on January 6, 1985.
Philosophy
The study of the Classics and Classical Civilizations are the cornerstones of Robert Welch University, and they were also the core ideals, value, morals and principles of the founding era. Robert Welch defined these as, “…a positive, forward-looking philosophy; a design and example of social organization which boldly and confidently offers leadership along the one hard but sure road to a better world.”