Thomas Jefferson’s personal reputation has been much tarnished in recent years as historians have uncovered ever more damning evidence of the secret shackled family he sired with the enslaved Sally Hemings, yet his historical significance looms the larger precisely because he, more than any other founding father, embodied the crucial discrepancy between lofty ideals and tawdry reality. Jefferson dreamed of a new nation that was not only independent but also enlightened. Toward that end, he created in 1825 the University of Virginia, with the goal of bringing the best minds of Europe over to nurture the fledgling youth of the new republic, who would be given free space in a “University of Adolescent Liberty” to pursue the life of the mind.
Recruiting the first cohort of University of Virginia professors, Jefferson hired five Europeans (four British, one German) and three Americans. But importing scholars was an easier task than creating a country hospitable to learning.
Jefferson’s problem was the students, not the teachers. The students at the University of Virginia tended to be, like Jefferson himself, plantation gentry with the hauteur intrinsic to the slave-owing class. They had little appetite for mental exertion, preferring to gamble and brawl rather than learn Latin or algebra. Suffused with a good-old-boy ethos, they prized manly belligerence and regarded the studious with contempt.
These strapping young men would have their slaves carry their books, which they themselves rarely deigned to open. They would regularly challenge each other and their professors to duels. They rioted with the chant, “Down with the European professors!” In September of 1825, after professors had been attacked with bricks and bottles, a campus gathering took place in the university’s rotunda. A tearful Jefferson, sitting on a long table with fellow former presidents James Madison and James Monroe, addressed faculty and students, trying to achieve calm with a mixture of disciplinary efforts and pleas for the students to govern each other.
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