[Back in March,
I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville
stories in anticipation of a
book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town,
because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about
another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city.
So here they are!]
On the
instructive early struggles of an educational pioneer.
I’ve been pretty
hard in this space on Cville’s favorite son and the namesake of my childhood
street (among 2,832 other things in town), Thomas
Jefferson, and I stand by those analytical critiques. But TJ also did a lot
of great things in his long and influential life, and I agree with his
tombstone’s argument that the founding
of the University of Virginia was among his most impressive achievements. While
the narrative that UVa was the nation’s
first state university is an inaccurate one, it was something even more
significant: America’s first non-sectarian university, one created and designed
with no denominational affiliation or sponsorship. Whether that made it entirely secular
is a matter for debate, but absent such affiliation (and with, for example,
no requirement for chapel attendance for its students), the university
represented a significant shift in American higher education in any case.
As is often the
case when such norms are challenged, Jefferson’s university faced pushback and
critique from religious leaders and other adversaries (such as its in-state
rival and Jefferson’s alma mater, the overtly Anglican William and Mary College)
in its early years. But as journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos document in
their recent book Rot, Riot, and
Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America
(2013), the far more extreme early struggles were those presented by the
students themselves, a group of (mostly) spoiled plantation aristocrats who
spent more time partying and dueling than studying, who (as that linked review
quotes) “randomly [shot] as passersby” and “whip[ped] professors,” and a masked
one of whom even murdered the
popular law professor John A.G. Davis in 1840. Jefferson did (spoiler
alert!) help the university change course, as did others including some of the
students (who designed
the famous Honor Code after the Davis killing), but in its early years UVa
was seemingly as far from Jefferson’s
ideal “academical village” as it could be.
Fun stories to
be sure (although slightly chilling ones for any professor to read!), but do
they have a broader significance, beyond simply (if importantly) revising our perspective
on this one university? I would argue that they do, on at least two levels. For
one thing, anyone who finds him or herself critiquing 21st century
college students for their
excessive partying or lack of focus on their studies or the like should
probably stop and realize a) college students have always been thus and b)
things were far worse in certain places and moments than they are now! And for
another, it’s worth considering one reason why UVa students could and did get
away with these crazy and violent behaviors for so long with few if any
reprisals: their privileged status, class, gender, and race. Mike
Brown, the African American teenager killed by a police offer in Ferguson,
Missouri, a few weeks ago, was about to start his college career as well—and
whatever Brown did or did not do on the day of his death, it’s fair to say that
it wasn’t nearly as bad as much of what went on in the early days of Mr.
Jefferson’s University.
Next Cville
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Stories from your town(s) you’d share?
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