Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [72]
Recall that Jefferson wanted not only an aesthetically beautiful and academically first-rate university. He also wanted a self-governed institution—an environment opposite to that of Yale, Harvard, and others, which he called “despotic seminaries.”24 Well, what he got by overlooking the European faculty’s authoritarian tendencies was worse than the New England colleges’ culture—he got the hierarchical culture of European colleges, of which the New England schools were only a copy. The heavy atmosphere maintained by professors, together with draconian restrictions imposed on students after the “drunken fourteen” riot, bred a resentment that soon started to show up in ways much more extreme than the routine soiling of their rooms.
In 1831, another riot broke out. In 1836, students smashed the windows of professors’ residences with sticks and stones and fired numerous muskets, leading the faculty to arm itself and flee, along with their families, to the upper floors. In 1838, students attacked a professor’s residence yet again, smashing windows and battering down the door. The following year saw more unrest, as two students assaulted the faculty chairman and horsewhipped him in the presence of more than one hundred other students, who did nothing to stop the brutal abuse.
Then came November 12, 1840. On that day two masked students were shooting and making a ruckus on the lawn. The faculty chairman, John A. G. Davis, came out to intervene. When he tried to remove the mask of one of the students, the student shot and fatally wounded Davis. The shock was tremendous—not only within the university but in Virginia and beyond—and the university descended into turmoil.
Jefferson wasn’t around to do anything about it—he had died on July 4, 1826, about a year after the university’s inauguration and exactly fifty years after the United States’ birth. We can’t know whether, faced with the evidence that self-government wasn’t working, he would have judged his own choices for the university critically. But with hindsight and armed with recent psychological insights, we can say that the institutional environment Jefferson built did not provide nutriments for people’s universal needs and thus, students were not self-motivated to take part in the freedom-based project.
Sure, this environment treated faculty as intrinsically equal. For the first time in America—and perhaps in the world—professors had no one above them. Until 1904, when its first president was finally named, the University of Virginia remained self-governed. To this day, UVA’s president enjoys much less authority than his counterparts in other universities. The environment Jefferson built also provided all the nutriments for the young professors to grow and to self-direct. As a result, although this self-government was a very unusual way to run an academic institution, the professors supported it fully. Indeed, they even used their freedom of action against one institutional aspect installed by Jefferson they considered unjust—the incentive that tied their salary to how well they succeeded in attracting students into their classes. For reasons we now understand, they rightly perceived this tangible reward as a controlling scheme. They fought against it and, in 1850, got it abolished. But unlike the professors, the students did not find the institutional environment nourishing.
From day one, their professors—used to the authoritarian European universities’ ways—did not treat them as equals. And after the “drunken fourteen” clampdown, students were practically infantilized. Throughout this period, students were forced to wear uniforms and to conform to a 6 a.m. wake-up and a 9 p.m. curfew. The pocket money they were allowed was too meager even to afford “a little chicken supper.”25 As we now know, when