The University of Virginia
When Thomas Jefferson wrote what he wanted to appear on his tombstone, he included the words, “Father of the University of Virginia”. Jefferson did far more than found the university in Charlottesville. He designed its campus and supervised its construction. He designed the rotunda and the initial student housing, the buildings of the school and the layout of the lawn. He even took a hand in the landscaping, and from his house at nearby Monticello he watched as the results unfolded below.
Jefferson designed much of the curriculum for the first year students and established innovations in education for its day, offering eight separate schools at the new university; ancient languages, modern languages, law, mathematics, medicine, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and chemistry. Divinity was notably absent, and Jefferson was insistent that it remain so. He also established two levels of degrees. A Graduate was one who successfully completed a course of study at one of the eight schools while a Doctor was one who completed the course of two or more of the schools.
Jefferson was not the only former president involved in the formation of the university, James Madison served as its second rector and James Monroe was on the school’s board of visitors while he was still in the White House. But no other person had as much influence on the founding of the university than Jefferson, motivated in no small amount by the deterioration in the quality of the education to be had at Virginia’s then extant other college, the College of William and Mary.
By 1817, when the decision to build the University of Virginia was arrived at, Jefferson had become openly contemptuous of William and Mary, which was his own alma mater. Jefferson believed that the quality of the teaching there had deteriorated with the loss of teachers such as George Wythe, under whom he had studied in his own time at the college. He also found William and Mary’s curriculum and philosophy to be dominated by the Anglican religion, formerly the official religion of Virginia.
After the first class was admitted in 1825, Jefferson continued his efforts to improve the school and the lives of the students, addressing them in the Rotunda, which served as a library, and in dinners and picnics at his Monticello home. Virginia opened an engineering school a decade after Jefferson’s death, making it the first university in the United States to have an engineering school. His influence on the school waned over time, but is still visible in its central lawn and what he called his “Academic Village”.