COLUMN: Thomas Jefferson’s smart classroom
Dinner was over by the time I finally made it to the University of Virginia campus. It had been a long distracting day of driving, planes and airports. The conference organizer kindly secured me a drink and we went outside where a few other participants were milling around. There was a little conversation, cigarettes were smoked and drinks consumed. We mostly soaked up the atmosphere. Fireflies danced about, briefly illuminating the muggy, still Virginia night. A few students lounged about on the center of “the lawn.” They were surrounded on three sides by Thomas Jefferson’s creation, the “academical village.” Impressive as it looks today, I found myself wondering how startling it must have been to the first students who in 1825 arrived by horse or carriage. It was soon time to go inside for the evening’s lecture. I was not disappointed. The speaker was a prominent political commentator and I knew I would be back for a campus tour the day after next.
Along with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson instructed that his tombstone should also record him as “Father of the University of Virginia.” For decades he had been contemplating the design of a university that would prepare students for careers and that would also prepare them to be free citizens. Jefferson did not make the misleading and largely artificial distinction between those two goals that we tend to make today. After he had gained legislative approval for a university, he mapped out the curriculum and took a leading role in hiring faculty. Once in operation though, the university was to be administered by the faculty under the supervision of an unpaid board, tellingly named the “visitors.”
The grounds, buildings and architecture were among Jefferson’s highest concerns. Jefferson disapproved of the traditional university, typified by Oxford and Cambridge, with its roots in religious education. The religious origins and the monarchical affiliations of those schools affected not only the curriculum but also the shape of the grounds and buildings. Jefferson found his alternative model in the philosophical schools of classical antiquity where students and teachers lived in close proximity but at a safe distance from the hurly-burly of the marketplace and the political assembly.
Jefferson was also concerned with the architecture of the campus. Jefferson owned and had studied closely Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, a Renaissance compilation of the principles of classical architecture. His design for the university owed much to Palladio and something to his contemporaries Benjamin Henry Latrobe and William Thornton. But Jefferson mostly acted alone. In borrowing from the past, he was not engaged in a mere simulation (to use that post-modern term). His goal was something quite new: a university that is compatible with an enlightened republicanism. Most immediately, Jefferson was appalled at the state of American architecture. Its saving grace was its flimsy construction and hence, impermanence. It would not last. The buildings and grounds of Jefferson’s university were to serve as first-hand examples of buildings and gardens of beauty and permanence. Beyond this, Jefferson aimed to create an institution that was friendly to “health, to study, to manners, morals and order.” His “academical village” would make possible “that quiet retirement so friendly to study.”
Many of Jefferson’s hopes were disappointed. The first students were rowdier and less interested in education than he expected. Education and the progress of science and politics were neither as intimately connected nor as inevitable as he imagined. Some of his own ideas about states’ rights and the biological basis of racial differences contributed not a little to the hoisting of the secessionist flag over his university. Nevertheless, no other founder thought as deeply about education as Jefferson and none – although it is now only dimly perceived – made so lasting a contribution to the American idea of public education. Jefferson’s university is simply the great symbol of that contribution. As funding for and confidence in public education plummets, today might be good time to recover the thinking that went into Jefferson’s visionary blending of beauty and practicality, permanence and progress, order and freedom in his academical village.
Before I could take my campus tour, a remarkably destructive mini-hurricane swept through Charlottesville. As my host and I snaked our way toward campus, carefully avoiding the many downed trees and power lines, we were reduced to horse and buggy speeds. After arriving we wandered through the carefully-crafted gardens with their strange serpentine brick wall boundaries. Then we walked across the lawn flanked by the 10 stately neoclassical “pavilions” to the dominating “Rotunda.” Jefferson modeled the Rotunda on Rome’s Pantheon, originally a great temple to the gods. In the place of those ancient sources of wisdom and power, Jefferson located the library. My host, a distinguished professor of American politics, ended my tour with a visit to a classroom. He had won one of the much-coveted rooms in the old academical village. Opening the door revealed a quiet, austere but elegant room with a lectern and chairs.
Peter McNamara teaches political science at Utah State University.