Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [66]
8
FROM MOTIVATION TO
SELF-MOTIVATION,
PART ONE
Beyond Grace and Intrinsic Equality
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON1
THOMAS JEFFERSON WROTE these words to a Welsh political philosopher, articulating both the possibility of self-governance—and its conditions. While the sentence served as a defense of and a supplement to the Declaration of Independence Jefferson had penned thirteen years earlier, it was also a seed for Jefferson’s vision, still decades in the future, of “a system of general education, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest.”2 How important this project was to him is attested to by Jefferson’s request that his three greatest achievements be mentioned on his tombstone: the Declaration of Independence, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom—and the University of Virginia, the fruit of his educational ambitions. Creating a university should have been an easy project for a political genius and a former U.S. president when Jefferson started it in 1814. Let’s see.3
It took five years, but Jefferson managed to get the Virginia General Assembly to pass the laws needed to charter the university. Funding the school would be a separate struggle. In the meantime, Jefferson, with his passion for architecture, helped to design the famous rotunda and Colonnade Club. He spent four hours a day for several months assembling a 6,860-volume library for the fledgling university, an impressive collection for the time. With the help of fellow Virginian and U.S. president James Madison, Jefferson defined a political curriculum for the school. Finally, he recruited the first eight professors, five of whom came all the way from England.
Perhaps the most distinctive of Jefferson’s undertakings was the self-governing organization he designed. To begin with, all the rules and procedures that were in place at other American colleges were completely abandoned in Jefferson’s plan. No courses or programs were required, leaving students totally free to choose what they wanted to study.4 To reinforce this freedom of choice and the competition among professors to offer compelling courses, Jefferson designed an incentive scheme with a base $1,500 annual salary, plus $25 for every enrolled student. The distinctions between freshmen, sophomores, and upperclassmen—seniors—were abandoned. Moreover, the whole hierarchy of a traditional university—the president, provosts, and other positions of authority—was eliminated. The university was to be totally self-governed by the faculty with a rotating chairman, overseen by a board of visitors: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and a few more cool names. And regarding the students, “Jefferson had worked out a plan for student self-government for he believed that young men from the best families could be counted on to govern themselves and remain reasonably well-behaved.”5
In March 1825, after many years of effort, he assisted at the opening of the University of Virginia’s idyllic Charlottesville campus, welcoming the first 40 students, a number that grew to more than 116 during the year. Happy and at the age of eighty-one now, Jefferson retired to his mansion at Monticello. There, a mere five miles away, he would host small groups of students for dinner on Sunday, and at other times would observe his young university with his spyglass, taking advantage of a hole he had had cut through the trees. Until …
Less than one month into that first academic term, Jefferson received devastating news. A group of fourteen drunken, masked students had gathered on the lawn after dark with a cry of “Down with the European professors!” When two professors arrived to investigate the riot and tried to unmask one student, they were welcomed by profanities and worse. The first was attacked with a cane and the second had a brick thrown at him. To add insult to physical injury, sixty-five students signed a resolution the following day condemning the two professors for daring to unmask