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Our History

Across Bristol and Providence campuses, ������Դ empowers students to discover their powerful combinations of academic programs, career training, and life skills to become the changemakers who work to improve society.

From Junior College to Comprehensive University

������Դ’s commitment to providing an accessible and excellent education to all learners took roots in our founding in 1956 as a community college in a Providence YMCA, the only institution in the state to offer associate degrees at a downtown campus at the time. Learners at every stage of their academic journey found the support and mentorship to become successful scholars and graduates, and ������Դ quickly grew into two campuses in Providence and Bristol offering our unique mix of liberal arts and professional programs.

While we have evolved to serve students from early college opportunities through bachelor’s, master’s, law degrees, and professional certifications, our vision has remained the same. At ������Դ, we dedicate our efforts to strengthening society through engaged teaching and learning that prepares our students to become the changemakers and leaders who will make a meaningful impact in our world.

Milestones in ������Դ’s Growth

Here are some fast facts about where we came from:

• With a state charter on February 14, 1956, Roger Williams Junior College became a two-year, degree-granting institution housed inside the Broad Street Providence YMCA. Soon after, the school became Roger Williams College and began conferring bachelor’s degrees, quickly outgrowing the space at the YMCA building.

• The Bristol campus was built in 1969 on 80 acres of waterfront land along the Mount Hope Bay, formerly operated as Ferrycliffe Farm, while continuing to maintain a vibrant Providence campus.

• Roger Williams College became ������Դ, adding another 50 acres of land to the campus in 1992.

• A year later, in 1993, the university established the ������Դ School of Law, Rhode Island’s only law school and a leader in public interest law.

• In 2015, ������Դ relocated and expanded its Providence campus to 1 Empire St., home to our Extension School (������Դ EXT), our ������Դ Law legal clinics, and our M.B.A. program. Our Providence campus is uniquely positioned in the heart of the capital city to deploy our faculty and students to lend expertise and service to the greater community.

Today ������Դ is a modern comprehensive university offering liberal arts and professional programs across Undergraduate, Graduate,  and Extension School programs. With our distinctive academic focus on marine science and innovation, law and justice, the designed and built environments, paired with a breadth of humanities and business programs, our graduates are prepared to succeed in a rapidly changing world.

Our Namesake: Roger Williams

A revolutionary and a rebel, Roger Williams rebuked many of his society’s norms, forcing him to flee persecution from his native England and to be exiled from colonial Massachusetts. The 17th-century founder of Providence was a devout Puritan minister who believed that all people had the right to worship as they chose and that government had no right to compel a person to worship in a certain way – or to worship at all. His most famous book on religious freedom was banned and burned.

Banished by Massachusetts during a bitter winter, Roger fled until he came to the land he would call Providence, where he created a community that was one of the freest in the western world. Founding Providence in 1636, he established the separation of church and state by removing religious doctrine from governance of the colony – perhaps the first place in the world to put full religious freedom into practice. He gave each head of household – including women – an equal vote and granted the citizens the power to endow the government with its authority. On his most revolutionary idea, Roger said, “I infer that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people.” This made Providence one of the most progressive and lively experiments of the time and his ideas were later embodied in the Rhode Island Charter of 1663.

Even more radical for his time, Roger publicly rebuked the King of England’s claim that “unoccupied” land in the colonies was free for the taking. He was the first person in the colonies to seek a land agreement with Indigenous Nations and settled the town of Providence with the express permission of the Narragansett Sachems. However forward-thinking for his time, Roger had a complicated relationship with Indigenous Peoples. One year after Providence was founded, he had an unfree Pequot boy living in his house, and he and others in the town of Providence profited from selling Indigenous people as prisoners of war into slavery following the King Philip’s War in 1676. ������Դ acknowledges these difficult truths about our namesake, and we use it to inspire the study of history in all of its complexity and to engage in dialogue on reconciling with our past.

Roger was also a first-generation student who attended Cambridge University on an academic merit, needs-based scholarship. He was a dedicated scholar and lifelong learner, who spoke multiple languages including Narragansett, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Dutch. He was a bibliophile and used his knowledge to engage in dialogue with people with which he fundamentally disagreed in order to convene a nuanced and multi-perspective debate on important topics. 

Our university’s pursuit of excellence in education, academic accomplishment, and community service is rooted in our namesake’s focus on intellectual exchange, critical thinking, and innovation as a means of improving a free society. It is this legacy that inspires our mission: To strengthen society through engaged teaching, learning, and research, and to prepare our students to become the changemakers and leaders for what the world needs next.