Helen Schaefer Gibson awarded honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by Washington College

At the Fall Convocation of 1991, represented here as September 1, 1991, Washington College conferred an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree upon Helen Schaefer Gibson, recognizing her two decades of service as the college’s First Lady from 1950 to 1970.[1] The ceremony took place during a year in which the college deliberately highlighted the contributions of women to its history. By awarding her this honorary degree, Washington College publicly affirmed the importance of the social, cultural, and representational labor she had performed—work that had long gone uncredited in formal academic hierarchies.

The significance of this honor lies in the way it elevates a traditionally gendered and often invisible role to one worthy of academic recognition. Gibson had hosted countless campus events, cultivated donor relationships, and helped define the college’s public image for a generation. In honoring her with a Doctor of Fine Arts, the institution implicitly acknowledged that such contributions constituted a form of creative and cultural leadership.[1] The award also reflected a broader, late twentieth‑century shift in higher education toward reassessing women’s historical roles on campus, from faculty pioneers to spouses and volunteers. Gibson’s honorary degree thus stands not only as a personal accolade but also as a symbolic corrective, inserting women’s unpaid or under‑recognized work into the official story of Washington College.