We The People: Examining the history and legacy of the University of Virginia

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - As Virginia honors the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 29News is highlighting the parts of our viewing area that make up the fabric of this community and this country.

This month, we recognize the University of Virginia, an institution that has been central to Charlottesville and Albemarle County since its founding in 1819.

With tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff, the UVA of today looks almost nothing like its founding in the early 19th century, with just a handful of professors and dozens of students.

But for many, the spirit of the university’s beginnings is palpable each time they return to Grounds.

“I think there is an ethos of excellence. I think there is a sense, one I always felt on the university, that it is imbued with a really important history,” said Phyllis Leffler, the President and Chair of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. “I think it’s impossible to walk the Grounds of the university, particularly the Central Lawn Grounds, and not feel in some ways that you’ve been imported back into the 19th century.”

The 19th century - when Thomas Jefferson set out to build a revolutionary form of higher education.

“I think Jefferson’s goal was to create a place that would educate the leaders of this new country,” said Brian Hogg, a historic preservation planner within the Office of the Architect at UVA. “That role of educating seeped into every aspect of the school...It was a very aspirational place. He had great hopes.”

Classes began in the spring of 1825, just a little over one year before Jefferson died and was buried at Monticello.

“It was a very small place,” Leffler said. “Students began by living on the lawn, as they do now, but those were the only places where they could live...The Rotunda was the library and the chemistry laboratory in the basement, and that was it.”

Hogg says Jefferson modeled his Academical Village after Roman architecture as a new model for the American Republic. But, he says, the buildings on the Lawn were also quite functional, with many standing the test of time.

“So much of it is still doing what it was designed to do,” Hogg said. Students still live in the rooms, faculty still live in the pavilions, you can still get food in one of the hotels, and the Rotunda has classrooms in it for the first time in a long time."

Only a few dozen students attended the first day of classes, but by the end of the year, more than a hundred were enrolled at Jefferson’s university.

“It’s a really fascinating university, in that it’s founded by Thomas Jefferson and he’s doing something pretty exceptional,” said Kirt von Daacke, a research professor at UVA. “He’s creating an Enlightenment university, the first one of its kind in America, with an elective curriculum.”

Jefferson’s goal was that students would come to UVA to pursue knowledge and follow that trail wherever it led them, which von Daacke says was a completely different philosophy from other universities at the time.

“That’s something the university still embraces today, and we rightly should,” von Daacke said. “I think baked into the cake of UVA is the really amazing idea that means it’s never gonna go necessarily where the people running it want it to because it’s driven by student self-governance and the pursuit of knowledge.”

Jefferson certainly didn’t build this hub of knowledge alone. The Gibbons Project, which von Daacke heads, aims to expand awareness and access to the histories of the hundreds of enslaved individuals who helped create UVA and to connect that to their living ancestors.

The project is named after Isabella and William Gibbons, whose last name also adorns the Gibbons House near Scott Stadium. The two were enslaved at UVA and, like their counterparts, played crucial roles in the construction of Jefferson’s Academical Village. After emancipation, Isabella Gibbons began teaching at what would later become the Jefferson School, while William Gibbons became the first person of color to serve as minister of the congregation now known as the First Baptist Church in Charlottesville.

“When I was an undergraduate, we were told that Thomas Jefferson built the place singlehandedly by himself,” von Daacke said. “That’s how we’ve changed, that we understand no, that wasn’t the case. So, we can both honor his educational architectural vision, but also understand that it was hundreds of enslaved people who built the bricks, did the carpentry, cut the stone, and I think that’s really important.”

The 2013 Commission on Slavery and the University kickstarted the conversations and work that would eventually lead to a physical manifestation of that sacrifice and suffering: the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, which sits across the Corner today.

Andrea Douglas, the Executive Director of the Jefferson School of African American Heritage, who worked extensively on that Commission and co-chaired the Commission on Segregation in 2018, says the memorial is based on thorough conversations with the community and with living ancestors of the enslaved.

“One of the biggest meetings they had about that was here [the Jefferson School], where someone in the audience said, hey, this is a lovely design, but we don’t feel the bodies, we don’t feel the notion of enslavement,” Douglas said. “Once he said that, all the designers went back, and that’s how Isabella Gibbons’ eyes end up on the memorial today.”

The work, Douglas says, wasn’t done, just as the struggle did not end in 1865. She and von Dacke are also co-editors of the book, After Emancipation: Racism and Resistance at the University of Virginia, which spotlights stories and perspectives from African American students at UVA in the late 19th century and well into the 20th century.

“It’s a story that details the daily struggles of an institution to live up to what it professes to be,” Douglas said. “You compare that, for instance, with someone who’s writing about being at the institution in the 21st century, and you get this sense that it’s a work in progress that’s still in progress, that those African American students, people who work at the institution, they see themselves as people who are in some ways groundbreaking, but over the course of 60 years they’re still breaking ground.”

Another group that broke significant ground at UVA were women.

“Before there were women, the reigning philosophy was certainly that the kinds of education that were being provided would not be appropriate for women,” said Leffler, who, as a professor emerita at UVA, has taught courses in the history of the university. “It was very much a southern philosophy of divided roles for men and women, and that prevailed for a very long period of time.”

While UVA didn’t go co-ed until 1970, Leffler says women made up the fabric of the institution long before that date, with participation in nursing training programs, graduate programs, and summer sessions in the Curry School of Education.

“There were women at the university in many capacities before the university even acknowledged, is willing to say, yes there were women here,” Leffler said.

In the 1990s, Leffler participated in a survey, sent out to the known women who graduated from UVA around when it began letting women pursue undergraduate degrees. With a total of roughly 3,000 responses, Leffler says, the experiences appear to be mixed.

“Some women came in and said it was real easy, it was great, no problem at all,” Leffler said. “Some women said well, my professors refused to even acknowledge I was in the classroom, or they called me mister.”

Leadership has also seen its fair share of change. For the first several decades of its existence, UVA did not have a president.

“Jefferson didn’t really believe in hierarchies, and he thought that a president, much like a king, could be corruptible or that the faculty wouldn’t have as much say,” Leffler said. “It was his strong sense of democratic governance that felt that the faculty should be in charge.”

But in 1895, an unexpected disaster hit: a large fire devastated the Rotunda and almost everything inside.

“Much of the library is gone, and of course this iconic building is no longer usable, and there has to be a rebuilding,” Leffler said. “That is the moment at which the university decides it needs a president.”

So, in 1905, the university’s very first president, Edward Alderman, assumed his duties. Alderman played a key role at the turn of the century: reaching out across the country to garner fundraising support and expanding the number of students who would have access to UVA.

“That really creates the modern university,” Leffler said.

More than a century later, UVA has begun a new chapter, with the selection of Scott Beardsley to serve as the 10th president. He’ll replace former President Jim Ryan, who resigned under pressure from the federal government last June.

The past year on Grounds has sparked outcry and demands to “de-politicize” higher education. Leffler says politics has always been ingrained in the fabric of the institution - especially with Colgate Darden, a former governor, serving as president in the past - but that it has never reached the level of what we’re seeing today.

“I think there are always these political tensions, but I think the university systems have largely been free from national interference, especially a state university,” Leffler said.

Douglas says that while much of the future is still unclear, a priority must be strengthening the often fraught relationship among UVA, Charlottesville, and Albemarle County.

“There’s always been this sort of town and gown relationship, and how do you as an institution embedded in a community... see the community as an equal partner?” Douglas said. “Did we see strides made? Sure. But that promise ended when Jim left, so we don’t know it’s going to pick up.”

Douglas, who earned her masters and PHD from UVA, says the Charlottesville she came to as a student is a far cry from the Charlottesville of today.

“I think the institution has come a long way, honestly,” Douglas said. “Do I believe it’s got longer to go? Of course, we all do.”

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, and UVA its 207th, Hogg hopes the community can channel the energy found in each stone and each pillar that defines UVA Grounds.

“I would hope that people can think about the optimism and idealism with which the school was founded, and the hope that was embodied in its creation, and that as we move forward in the future, that it’s that hopefulness that helps define the place,” Hogg said.

It’s that hopefulness, Hogg says, that you find more than 200 years ago, in Jefferson’s determination to make UVA a reality.

“This really was a labor of his late life, and it’s amazing that someone who had so much going on in his life for those 70 years could still manage to act so idealistically and so optimistically in creating this institution,” Hogg said.

Today, UVA is recognized as the top college in Virginia and the second-best value public university in the nation, with 18,000 undergraduate students, including 3,000 international students. It is unrecognizable from the tiny college of 1825, but, Leffler says, that ethos of excellence, remains.

“[Jefferson] believed that you could not sustain a democracy, or a democratic republic, without an educated citizenry,” Leffler said. “He’d be enormously proud of the reputation of the university and its growth to a position of international stature.”

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