[As with
everything else in this plague-ridden year, my sons and my annual summer trip
to Charlottesville unfortunately hasn’t been able to happen as planned. But this
blog will always return to my home state, this time for a series on a few
of Virginia’s pivotal historical moments!]
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 oft-shared narrative that UVa was the nation’s
first state or public 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.
Next VA history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginia histories or contexts you’d share?
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