Jefferson, twenty years after his death, had finally triumphed. His vision, the dream of his old age, had won out after a perilous birth and infancy. As a result of his efforts to create the university, Jefferson’s already controversial reputation had suffered a blow. Enemies had lashed out at him personally, but to the end, he remained optimistic that history would vindicate him. “The attempt [to create the university] ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views, and of so much ignorance, and I have been considered as so particularly its promoter, that I see evidently a great change of sentiment towards myself,” Jefferson had lamented to his friend Cabell as early as January 1825, just months before the school’s opening. “I have ever found in my progress through life, that, acting for the public, if we do always what is right, the approbation denied in the beginning will surely follow us in the end.”1
Though the path was longer than Jefferson envisioned, his school ultimately became a preeminent institution. His idea of intellectual investigations unhampered by theology would not only prevail at his university but would spread throughout the nation. His university endured the criticism of those who resisted change; later universities would more easily abandon the old ways and experiment with the new.
In a short twenty years, Jefferson and his disciples had turned a scraggly field on the outskirts of a little river town into a unique institution. Where pigs and cows once roamed over raw red clay, now the model of a secular public American university rooted itself into the landscape and flourished.
School officials had begged for more money from the state since Jefferson conceived the idea of the university; with renewed confidence, the General Assembly finally upped its annual contribution to $40,000, a stunning windfall.
Students throughout the southern states began to trek from their small hamlets and large plantations to Charlottesville. In the school’s first fifty years, roughly 5,400 Virginians attended the school. North Carolina contributed 880 students; South Carolina, 520; Florida, 67; Georgia, 820; Alabama, 575; Mississippi, 365; Louisiana, 265; Texas, 135; Arkansas, 48; Tennessee, 230; Kentucky, 203; Missouri, 110; and Maryland and the District of Columbia, 390. Only 155 students came from northern states. Importantly, enrollment at the University of Virginia equaled and exceeded enrollment at rivals Harvard and Yale by the 1850s. Jefferson’s plan had worked.
The school soon expanded from its original eight departments to nineteen, including engineering, agriculture, and astronomy, bringing the curriculum more in line with Jefferson’s early vision. Private supporters stepped forward with money. Donations began to pour in. By 1885, the university had received the whopping sum of nearly $900,000.
Meanwhile, the school began turning out southern leaders. In its first fifty years, it produced 6 governors, 7 lieutenant governors, 62 congressmen (and 31 Confederate congressmen), 2 cabinet ministers, 167 judges, 348 members of state legislatures, 59 authors and artists, 22 mayors, and 8 state attorneys general. And the university managed all this despite the catastrophic effects of the Civil War. University students and alumni rallied to the Confederate battle flag. A large number of Confederate engineers were university graduates, as were most of the ranking staff officers. Two of the Confederacy’s secretaries of war were University of Virginia men—George Wythe Randolph and James A. Seddon. More than three hundred alumni were killed in battle.
Throughout the southern states in the nineteenth century, the University of Virginia was known simply as “The University,” a sobriquet that captures the esteem and adoration of a region steeped in ignorance and violence.
Despite that success, the university that evolved was not quite what Jefferson planned. Eventually, the Board of Visitors would name the school’s first president—Edwin Alderman—in 1904. The office of president struck Jefferson as undemocratic. Perhaps equally troubling to him was the fact that in his day college presidents were always leading churchmen. So opposed was Jefferson to the concept of a president that when the Board of Visitors created the position and offered it to the attorney general of the United States in 1826, Jefferson wrote a strong protest in the school’s records. When the attorney general declined the position—possibly because of the great statesman’s vehement opposition—the board would not attempt to create the position again until Alderman’s appointment.
Also changed was Jefferson’s plan to allow students to spend as little as one year at the school studying courses that could prove practical to them. The university eventually became a four-year school that granted degrees.
But Jefferson’s big ideas prevailed. “It is surprising to observe how Jefferson anticipated many of the modern educational ideas which have come into conspicuous favor since his day,” wrote N. H. R. Dawson, a U.S. commissioner of education, in 1887.2
More recently, the historians John Brubacher and Willis Rudy described Jefferson as “the first great protagonist of the public secular university.”3 According to Brubacher and Rudy,
The university which Thomas Jefferson established at Charlottesville in Virginia was America’s first real state university. It is an authentic example of this type for a number of reasons. First of all, it aimed from the beginning to give more advanced instruction than the existing colleges, to permit students to specialize and to enjoy the privileges of election. Its course of study when it opened for instruction in 1825 was much broader than that which was customary at the time. Secondly, the University of Virginia was by the express intent of its constitution a thoroughly public enterprise, rather than a private or quasi-public one. Finally, its early orientation was distinctly and purposefully secular and non-denominational. In all of this, it represented the most thoroughgoing embodiment of the “revolutionary” spirit of the Enlightenment to be found in American higher education during the first decades of the 19th century.4
As Jefferson himself once wrote of his university, “It belongs not to political parties and religious sects as a field in which they may carry on their conflicts for predominance. It belongs simply to the people, and to all the people whether they belong to political parties or to none; whether they belong to religious sects or have no religious connections.”5
Following Jefferson’s lead, the nation’s other public universities eventually became secular, uncontrolled by church denominations. (So advanced was Jefferson’s thinking, though, that his secular university would still be novel into the early twentieth century, when some public universities still forced students to attend chapel.) In Jefferson’s time, universities were merely another avenue by which religion exercised its influence on society. Each denomination founded its own schools. When states founded schools, they only did so with the blessings of the church. However, the revolution that Jefferson had set in motion would not be turned back.
Jefferson’s curriculum was a marvel of practicality. Under the old system, developed by the church, students learned Greek, Latin, and mathematics to prepare them for the professions of law, medicine, and the clergy. So it had been for centuries. Jefferson’s courses excluded theology, dramatically shifting one of the key roles of universities. He followed that innovation by introducing courses he felt had more practical value to students, especially to those who would only attend for one or two years. In Jefferson’s school, students could learn modern languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Students could study architecture, astronomy, geography, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, political economy, history, politics, and ethics—courses that could be found in any college catalog today. Jefferson also tinkered with teaching methods. Other American schools taught by rote memorization. Professors read to students from textbooks. Jefferson demanded that professors interact with their students, answering and asking questions. Professors truly lectured instead of merely reading out loud.
In another dramatic change, Jefferson devised and promoted an elective system within American higher education at a time when most students were required to take identical courses, no matter their interest or ambition in life. Jefferson crafted a system in which students could choose an area of interest to study. That unique elective scheme quickly spread, and by 1884 at least thirty-five southern colleges and universities were using it. After two hundred years of existence, even hidebound Harvard eventually reformed its curriculum along Jefferson’s lines.
Finally, Jefferson’s reliance on honor as the foundation of student discipline was realized, and it saved his university. Other schools, following the University of Virginia, eventually adopted their own codes of honor. Before the University of Virginia’s Honor System was embraced, students were treated as children. Professors spied on them and imposed severe punishments for minor infractions. Jefferson’s belief was that students would police themselves. The belief proved erroneous because the students who arrived on campus were not the mature young men he anticipated. Consequently, the students misbehaved, and the professors imposed rules, creating a police state in the precincts, which Jefferson had tried so hard to avoid. The formal adoption of the Honor System in 1842 would eventually transform students into overseers of their own behavior, which Jefferson had envisioned so many years previously. The Honor System, aided by the civilizing effects of temperance and religion, helped tame the students by recognizing them as men of honor and appealing to their own view of themselves as gentlemen.
The school’s Honor System—which helped save the school in its infancy—is still in place. The only crimes under the code, born of so much violence and pain, are lying, cheating, and stealing. Expulsion remains the only choice of punishment if a student is found guilty. Though referendums to allow alternate, milder punishments are routinely held, they are routinely voted down by students, who run the Honor System themselves.
Over the course of nearly 170 years, dozens of students, judged by their classmates, have been expelled for violating the Honor System. Even today, students must sign a pledge vowing to follow the Honor System before they can become university students.
Students at the university today are still taught according to the Jeffersonian method. As Jefferson said, “The university will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as freedom is left free to combat it.”6