The Beginnings of Higher Education in Northern Virginia

George Mason University is a relatively "young" institution compared to other colleges and universities in the area. In fact, when the first buildings on the current Fairfax, Virginia campus were completed in 1964, George Mason College (as it was called at the time) had only been in operation for six years and was housed in an old eight-room elementary school building near Bailey's Crossroads in Fairfax County.

Mason's early history is closely tied to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (UVa). In September 1949 UVa launched the Northern Virginia University Center headed by its own Dr. John Norville Gibson Finley in response to the growing need for higher education in the area. The Center offered evening classes for adults at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington.

On November 28 1949 Charles Harrison Mann Jr., a lawyer from Arlington, Virginia, held a meeting for group of about twenty Northern Virginia citizens to discuss the status of higher education in the Northern Virginia area. This group organized to help promote and advise the new Northern Virginia Center. Though the Center was a first step in creating an atmosphere suitable for expansion of higher education, Mann and his group (some of whom became his constituents when he was elected Delegate to Virginia's Tenth District in 1954) would tirelessly apply themselves toward establishing a more traditional college to accommodate Northern Virginia's increasing college-age population. Initial success came in 1956 when Delegate Mann helped push through Virginia House Resolution No. 5 in the General Assembly authorizing a branch college of UVa in Northern Virginia.

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