CHAPTER 41
The University of Virginia from Dream to Reality
The last week of November 1821, Jefferson wrote an eloquent letter to William Short, conveying his hopes for the University of Virginia: “It will be a splendid establishment, would be thought so in Europe, and for the chastity of its architecture and classical taste leaves everything in America far behind it.”1 These words convey the profound satisfaction Jefferson felt at the moment. Finally, his dream of the ideal university was becoming a reality. It had been a long time coming. Construction of the Rotunda had yet to begin, but the rest of the campus was definitely showing signs of progress. Six pavilions, eighty-two dormitories, and two hotels had been completed. Once built, the Rotunda would be the university’s centerpiece. It would unify the campus in terms of both its architecture and its function: Jefferson had designed the Rotunda as the library. Just as he had imagined how Monticello would appear before it was finished, he could now imagine how the University of Virginia would appear when it welcomed its first class of students. Maybe not the next year and maybe not even the year after that, but soon it would open, soon it would emerge as a great university.
Jefferson had been dreaming of the ideal university at least since the late 1770s, when he drafted the “Bill for Amending the Constitution of the College of William and Mary,” whose twofold purpose had been to turn William and Mary from a school under the auspices of the Church of England into a public institution and to modernize its curriculum to embrace many new fields of study. Though he had established several professorships, he never could implement the full-scale reforms he had envisioned for William and Mary.
Eventually he realized that instead of changing an existing institution, what he really needed to do was to start a new one from scratch. In his last full year as vice president, his plans for a new university developed far enough for him to solicit help from others to design a curriculum. He wrote Joseph Priestley to get his thoughts on the matter, but Jefferson’s letter shows that his concept for a state university was already well developed: “We wish to establish in the upper and healthier country, and more centrally for the state, an University on a plan so broad and liberal and modern, as to be worth patronising with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink of the cup of knoledge and fraternize with us.”2 He also told Priestley about his desire to recruit professors in Europe and offer them salaries sizable enough to ensure that they would come to Virginia to stay.
Learning of a bill to establish a state university in the General Assembly of Virginia in 1805, Jefferson wrote Littleton Tazewell to offer some thoughts on both the faculty and the administration of the proposed university. When it came to the faculty, Jefferson reiterated ideas he had shared with Priestley and made some further suggestions. He recommended a small board of visitors. The responsibilities of serving as a visitor required intellect, tact, and decisiveness. A university’s board of visitors had to analyze all the different fields of study, distribute them into professorships, and superintend the curriculum. Jefferson doubted whether there were enough qualified candidates in Virginia to fill a large board of visitors.3
He suggested that the curriculum be as flexible and open-ended as possible. It should be able to change with the times. He was already foreseeing a university that would last for centuries: “What is now deemed useful will in some of its parts become useless in another century.” The constitution and statutes of the ideal university should be written to let it keep pace with the progress of knowledge. It should not be like the tradition-bound European universities—Cambridge, Oxford, the Sorbonne—which, he asserted, “are now a century or two behind the science of the age.”4 Actually, Jefferson had great respect for Cambridge and Oxford: this assertion is another hyperbole used for rhetorical purposes.
Jefferson also offered some thoughts on the architecture of the ideal university. The letter to Tazewell represents his earliest known articulation of the idea of a university as a village. This idea would ultimately guide his plans for the University of Virginia. Five years after writing Tazewell on the subject, he expanded his notion of the ideal campus when he offered the following advice to the Trustees for the Lottery of East Tennessee College:
I consider the common plan followed in this country, but not in others, of making one large and expensive building, as unfortunately erroneous. It is infinitely better to erect a small and separate lodge for each separate professorship, with only a hall below for his class, and two chambers above for himself; joining these lodges by barracks for a certain portion of the students, opening into a covered way to give a dry communication between all the schools. The whole of these arranged around an open square of grass and trees, would make it, what it should be in fact, an academical village, instead of a large and common den of noise, of filth and of fetid air. It would afford that quiet retirement so friendly to study, and lessen the dangers of fire, infection and tumult.5
Jefferson would follow this advice himself when it came to designing the campus of the University of Virginia.
Taken together, the letters to Priestley, Tazewell, and the Tennesseans show that Jefferson had already formed the basic aspects of his dream university. He imagined its administration, architecture, curriculum, and faculty. There was one thing he needed to make his university a reality, something that no amount of imagination could produce: money, and lots of it. Since he wanted to make the university a public institution, he knew that the capital had to come from the state; therein lay the problem. To build the great university he envisioned would require substantial appropriations from the state legislature. Given the difficulty of obtaining public funds for education, Jefferson slowly realized that it might be better to start his “academical village” on a more modest scale.
In 1814, his nephew Peter Carr was serving as president of the board of trustees for Albemarle Academy, a local institution established years before that had since fallen on hard times. The board wanted to breathe new life into the school. The fact that Carr had assumed leadership as an educator was enough to make his uncle proud: Jefferson had overseen Carr’s education, and now Carr was helping to educate a new generation. That year Jefferson was named a trustee to the Albemarle Academy. The original plans for revamping the school were fairly modest. Once Jefferson came on board, the Albemarle Academy began to dream big.
Later that year, he wrote Carr a detailed letter outlining a plan for the academy. This letter forms an important contribution to the history of American educational writing. Jefferson reiterated the statewide system of elementary and secondary education he had been advocating ever since he drafted “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.” Though the resources of the Albemarle Academy were modest, he saw no reason to limit the curriculum. If they could only afford to hire four professors, so be it. They should make sure they hired professors who could teach as many subjects as possible.
According to Jefferson’s elaborate plan, the first professor would teach ancient and modern languages, ancient and modern history, rhetoric, and oratory; the second professor, anatomy, mathematics, medicine, and physics; the third professor, botany, chemistry, minerals, and zoology; and the fourth would teach philosophy. Jefferson admitted that these fields of study were more “than ought to be imposed on, or can be competently conducted by a single professor permanently.” As the school grew, professorships could be subdivided periodically “until each professor shall have no more under his care than he can attend to with advantage to his pupils and ease to himself.”6 In other words, the professorships would become increasingly specialized over time. Jefferson did more than merely project the future of the Albemarle Academy in his letter to Carr; he foresaw the growth of the modern American university.
Capital remained the biggest obstacle preventing the Albemarle Academy from becoming what Jefferson imagined it could be. The board of trustees petitioned the General Assembly of Virginia, asking it to appropriate funds for the
school. The board also petitioned to have the name changed to Central College. The state did have some funds available. To its credit, the legislature had created the Literary Fund in 1810 to support education. The Literary Fund stipulated that confiscations, derelict personal property, escheats, fines, forfeitures, and penalties accruing to the state would be appropriated to encourage learning.7 While a good start, the Literary Fund alone could not provide the kind of capital Jefferson needed to see his educational plans into reality. He realized that he needed help—inside help, someone within the legislature to do his bidding.
The first week of January 1815, Jefferson wrote Senator Joseph C. Cabell to seek his aid in pushing through legislation to benefit Albemarle Academy. He could hardly have made a better choice. A Virginian through and through, Cabell had been born in Amherst County, attended William and Mary, and read law in Richmond. Jefferson met him around 1800, when Cabell, then in his early twenties, had embarked on a program of self-improvement. As he had done for so many other bright, ambitious young men, Jefferson supplied Cabell with a reading list. Actually, he gave him two reading lists, one devoted to English history and another encompassing a wide range of subjects: ancient history, botany, chemistry, ethics, mathematics, medicine, natural history, and politics.8 Poor health forced Cabell to leave his studies for Europe, where he became the traveling companion of Washington Irving. Back in Virginia, Cabell entered politics and, in 1810, was elected state senator. He would emerge as one of the most active members of the Virginia Senate.9
Jefferson expressed much confidence in Cabell, telling him that the trustees of Albemarle Academy were counting on him as the “main pillar of their support.”10 To fill in the necessary background about the school and its goals, he sent Cabell a detailed letter on July 5, 1815, accompanied by several supporting documents: a copy of his letter to Peter Carr, copies of the petitions to the legislature, and a copy of his letter to John Adams in which he defined the natural aristocracy and explained how his educational system would be able to identify and educate the leaders of tomorrow.
This letter to Cabell shows that Jefferson was thinking about an institution that was much more than a local academy: he was dreaming about his ideal university again.11 He told Cabell about the possibility of obtaining world-class professors who would make their school superior to any in the United States, possibly superior to any university in Europe. Jefferson’s dreams were infectious. Upon reading all the documents he had sent, Cabell needed no more convincing. He took the cause on as his own and fought hard to get the legislation and funds necessary to make the Albemarle school into a great institution, to make Jefferson’s dream come alive. Indeed, their correspondence can be read as a chronicle of the early history of the University of Virginia.
A postwar windfall proved a boon for public education in the state. In 1815, Virginia received a surplus from the U.S. government for expenditures made during the War of 1812. It was up to the legislature to decide what to do with this windfall. The day the vote was scheduled, Cabell shrewdly arranged to have the Richmond Enquirer publish Jefferson’s letter to Peter Carr outlining his system of state education and his plans for the Albemarle Academy. The letter exerted an important influence on the legislators, who voted to add the surplus to the Literary Fund.12
Jefferson’s plans were being implemented, but he counted progress not in days or weeks, or even months, but in years. In the prehistory of the University of Virginia, one major event is followed by a year of legislative wrangling before another major event occurs. In 1816, the General Assembly passed a bill for establishing a college in Albemarle County. Albemarle Academy would now be Central College. The first meeting of the board of visitors would not take place until May 5, 1817—but what a meeting it would be. No governing board of any American university, before or since, has had a more distinguished membership, which included two former presidents and the current one—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, who had been inaugurated earlier that year.
Five more months passed before the cornerstone of the first pavilion was laid on October 6. Central College was finally being built. But Jefferson was not content to stop there. He still wanted to transform the college into a university. Doing that meant going back to the legislature. On February 22, 1818, it passed a bill establishing a state institution of higher learning to be called the University of Virginia.
From Jefferson’s perspective, the most natural thing to do would be to turn Central College into the University of Virginia, but the legislature had stipulated three possible locations for the University of Virginia: Charlottesville, Lexington, and Staunton. A conference was scheduled for the first week of August 1818 at Rockfish Gap, about thirty miles west of Monticello. Jefferson presided over the conference. Not surprisingly, the Central College site was chosen as the location for the University of Virginia. The conference also decided upon a general architectural plan and sketched out the curriculum. They decided that the University of Virginia would offer coursework in such disciplines as anatomy and medicine, ancient languages, law, mathematics, modern languages, moral philosophy, natural history, and natural philosophy.
Jefferson took the responsibility of writing a report of the Rockfish Gap conference, which was published as a pamphlet titled Proceedings and Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, Presented December 8, 1818. More than merely a set of practical instructions for establishing the University of Virginia, Proceedings and Report was recognized as a major treatise on American education. The leading periodicals of the day reviewed the pamphlet and, for the most part, were quite appreciative. The reviewer for the Analectic Magazine—to take a periodical Jefferson read, for example—called Proceedings and Report “a remarkable instance of practical republicanism” and said that it contained “many novel suggestions worthy the attention of our seminaries of learning already established.”13 Niles’ Weekly Register reprinted the entire text of Proceedings and Report. A headnote explained: “We take a sort of national pride in seeing such papers—from an American pen. It would do honor to any age and any nation.—It is, we believe, with a few variations, from the ever luminous pen of Thomas Jefferson.”14 Beyond their appreciation for his educational scheme, these comments affirm Jefferson’s widespread recognition as a great writer.
The fullest notice appeared in that staid and stodgy Boston quarterly, the North American Review. While applauding the ambitious educational scheme Jefferson outlined, its reviewer, the Harvard professor Edward Everett did have some misgivings about the design of the campus and the curriculum. Everett was unsure whether it was a good idea to house the professors so close to their students and complained that the plan made no provisions for religious worship. Furthermore, Proceedings and Report made inadequate provisions for a university library—“the life and soul of any university.”15
In terms of the proposed curriculum, Everett approved Jefferson’s plan for teaching modern languages and hoped that Yale College and Harvard would follow suit. He also liked the idea of teaching Anglo-Saxon. There was one gap in the modern language curriculum: Portuguese should be taught, as well. Furthermore, Everett wanted to see a professor of divinity. He disliked the idea suggested in Proceedings and Report that religion was a subset of ethics and, therefore, important only as a moral supplement. Jefferson’s educational scheme institutionalized ideas embodied in his library catalogue, his “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus,” and The Life and Morals of Jesus. But Everett bristled at this approach to religion: “The result of this hazardous experiment it is not for us to anticipate.”16
Like the British quarterlies on which it was patterned, the North American Review assumed a role as guardian and protector of the English language. Even as Everett recommended Proceedings and Report, he took issue with Jefferson’s neologisms: “We beg leave to commend the whole Report to our readers, as an uncommonly interesting and skilful paper; well assured that they will overlook a little neologism in the
language, and a few unauthorised words such as location, centrality, grade, and sparse, for the sake of the liberal zeal for science which it breathes and inculcates.”17
Jefferson typically enjoyed reading the North American Review. He was more tolerant of it than one University of Virginia alumnus, who recommended that a fellow writer throw all his back issues of the journal “out of the window to the pigs.”18 For the most part, Jefferson was pleased with what the North American Review said about Proceedings and Report. Speaking of its review, Jefferson told John Adams: “I was relieved on finding in it much coincidence of opinion, and even, where criticisms were indulged, I found they would have been obviated had the developments of our plan been fuller. But these were restrained by the character of the paper reviewed, being merely a report of outlines, not a detailed treatise, and addressed to a legislative body, not to a learned academy.”19 Perhaps the reviewer’s observation that Proceedings and Report lacked a detailed plan for a library hurt Jefferson most. He did have great plans for the university library, but this report was not the place to develop them. He agreed that the library was the life and soul of any university.
The reviewer’s critique of Jefferson’s neologisms also upset him. It reminded him of the critique of Americanisms that frequently recurred in the British quarterlies. Writing to Adams, Jefferson defended his use of the word “location”: “It is a good word, well sounding, obvious, and expresses an idea which would otherwise require circumlocution.” Identifying himself as “a friend to neology,” Jefferson offered Adams a spirited defense of it. Neology was “the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.” Language must progress with the sciences. As new discoveries are made, new words must be invented to name these discoveries. Jefferson was on a roll. He continued:
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