by Dick Hall-Sizemore

We hear a lot on this blog regarding the current state of the University of Virginia. The Jefferson Council wants to lead it “back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence.” If one examines the actual early years of UVa under the direction of the Sage of Monticello, an interesting contrast arises.

Let’s examine the faculty. One of Jim Bacon’s most frequent criticisms is how the current UVa president, Jim Ryan, has assembled a faculty of doctrinaire liberals. He longs for the good old days of free inquiry.

Mr. Jefferson was very particular about whom he hired as faculty at UVa. and was careful not to hire anyone who might espouse a heretical position. As described by Dumas Malone, the esteemed Jefferson biographer (The Sage of Monticello, pp. 397-418), those faculty members not selected by Jefferson or James Madison, his close collaborator, were selected by Jefferson’s agent sent to Europe to find professors. 

The most difficult position to fill was the professorship of law. Jefferson’s first choice turned it down, perhaps preferring a promising law practice to a teaching position at a still non-existent university. Another possibility could have been James Kent, a distinguished New York jurist, but Jefferson would not even consider him due to Kent’s “consolidationist” views. “An angel from heaven who should inculcate such principles in our school of government should be rejected by me,” he wrote to his talent scout. To Madison, he expressed a fear that “Richmond lawyers” or “someone infected with the doctrine of consolidation” might be proposed. To guard against such an eventuality, he saw it as his duty to prescribe the textbooks in government that were to be used. (Malone, p. 417)

Referring to Jefferson’s famous quote, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead….,” even Malone, for whom Jefferson seemingly could do no wrong, concedes, “We may properly ask if the position he took in 1825 concerning the teaching of government can be reconciled with it.” (Malone, p. 418)

Three distinguished historians at UVa were more blunt than the always circumspect Malone, “Certainly, in the 1820s, Jefferson saw the University as a means to limit the spread of what he saw as pernicious northern and Federalist ideas, including immediate abolitionism, with which he believed too many Virginian and southern students were being infected at northern universities.”

As for admissions to UVa., we are told that the school should honor Jefferson’s call for equality in the Declaration of Independence, “the essence of [which] is that every person is treated as an individual rather than as a member of a racial, gender, ethnic, or religious group.” Also admissions, should be based on merit. 

History is not kind to UVa’s admissions policies in regard to equality. The first Black student was not admitted until 1950, and then to the law school under court order. The first Black undergraduates were admitted in 1955. Even so, they fared better than women. The “Gentlemen’s University” did not admit its first female undergraduates until 1970. (That was the year I graduated from William and Mary, which became a coed institution more than 50 years before Mr. Jefferson’s university took the plunge.)

As for merit, UVa’s admissions standards under Jefferson were not very stringent. Jefferson lamented to Madison that the students were “so defectively prepared” that it had been necessary to relax for the first year the admissions requirements. (Malone, p. 422). Jefferson characterized the students as falling into one of three groups: One-third were hard working; one-third were reasonably diligent, and the remainder consisted of “idle ramblers incapable of application.” (Malone, p. 463)

The school’s students did not meet very high standards for character in the early years, either. The UVa Magazine provides the following description of those students:

“Some students came to the University to learn, but many came to lark and laze. These students of the first two decades, often the spoiled, self-indulgent scions of Southern plantation owners or prosperous merchants, led a life of dissipation. With a sense of honor easily bruised, the wrong word, the wrong look could easily lead to a scuffle, if not a duel. The students brandished guns freely, sometimes shooting in the air, sometimes at each other. They drank, gambled, rioted and vandalized property (even taking a hatchet to the front doors of the Rotunda).”

In summary, even if one were to assume that Jim Bacon’s characterization of the current UVa faculty is accurate, it would be clear that the administration today had done exactly what Jefferson did — assembled a faculty that reflected a preferred viewpoint and resisted bringing in any that would challenge that viewpoint. As for the student body, it obviously is more egalitarian, studious, and of a higher character than those of Jefferson’s day.