[Last week my
sons and I returned to my hometown of Charlottesville, pretty much exactly a
year after the white
supremacist/neo-nazi rallies there last August (which took place on the day
we arrived in town last summer, because apparently that’s just life as an AmericanStudier
these days). So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy a few contexts for this exemplary
American city’s unfolding histories, leading up to a special weekend post
reflecting on where we are in August 2018.]
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 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 famously killed by a police offer in
Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, 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.
Last Cville contexts
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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