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"A University should not be a house but a village." Thomas Jefferson wrote that in 1805, as President, to a Virginia legislator, and when he finally got to build a university thirteen years later he built exactly that. The University of Virginia gave the United States its idea of a college campus: separate buildings for teaching and living, arranged around open ground, instead of one great hall that held everybody and everything.
Forty years of trying
Jefferson believed a democracy would survive only if its people were educated — "knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness." In his time there was no public school system; only the children of the wealthy could be tutored for a university, so only the wealthy reached positions of leadership. He wanted what he called a "natural aristocracy" of virtue and talent in place of an "artificial aristocracy" of wealth and birth.
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 1779 | His bill "for the more general diffusion of learning": free schools in every ward, the best pupils sent on at public expense, the best of those to a university. Not passed |
| 1796 | A similar bill; the legislature allowed elementary schools at each county's discretion, but the wealthy would have paid for them, and Jefferson believed none ever began |
| 1816 | Central College, a private project near his home at Monticello, is chartered |
| February 21, 1818 | The legislature establishes a state university, with $15,000 a year; Jefferson calls it "a bantling of forty years birth and nursing" |
| January 25, 1819 | The University of Virginia is named and chartered, on Central College's site |
| March 7, 1825 | It opens, to 125 students |
| July 4, 1826 | Jefferson dies; building work on the Rotunda is still going on |
The academical village
The site was farmland a mile west of Charlottesville, once owned by James Monroe — rural on purpose, as Jefferson disliked cities. He drew the neoclassical plans himself, designing the first five pavilions in fifteen days, and rode the four miles from Monticello to the site almost every day to watch it built. He specified that the bell carry for two miles, and designed the brickyard that made the bricks.
By opening day ten pavilions stood along the Lawn, each a professor's home with a lecture room below. Colonnades joined them to the student rooms between, and the south end was left open to the mountains. Behind them ran the Ranges — more student rooms and six dining halls, the "hotels" — with gardens between, enclosed by serpentine brick walls. At the head of the Lawn stood the Rotunda, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome.
A library where the chapel would be
Other American colleges existed largely to train clergy. Jefferson built no chapel. The Rotunda held the library, at the centre of the plan, and he drew up a list of 7,000 books to fill it. There were no required courses: students chose among the lectures offered, because, in his words, the university would be "based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind."
The people it was meant to educate were narrower than the words. The university was built and run in large part by enslaved labourers — which the University of Virginia now marks with a memorial on its grounds — and the "whole people" Jefferson wanted enlightened did not include them.
Sources
Written from the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places lesson Thomas Jefferson's Plan for the University of Virginia: Lessons from the Lawn, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which draws on the National Register nomination for the University of Virginia Historic District and on Jefferson's letters (Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1903–1904). The closing paragraph adds what the lesson leaves out.
Licencia: CC0 1.0 (dominio público) · Adaptado de www.nps.gov
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