The University of Virginia (UVA or Virginia) is a public research university located in Charlottesville City and Albemarle County in Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his Academical Village, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its original governing Board of Visitors included three U.S. presidents: Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, the latter as sitting president of the United States at the time of its foundation. As its first two rectors, presidents Jefferson and Madison played key roles in the university's foundation, with Jefferson designing both the original courses of study and the university's original architecture. The original campus contains President Monroe's former residence and law office, today used as a residential college.
Now expanded to of central campus, the modern university is composed of eight undergraduate and three professional schools: the School of Law, the Darden School of Business, and the School of Medicine.Departments and Schools of UVA , accessed February 21, 2016 The university has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 1904.
The university's leadership, faculty, research staff, and alumni have included several United States presidents, foreign heads of state, Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, a Dan David Prize winner, Marshall Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, and 57 Rhodes Scholars—the most of any state university. Its alumni include 31 state governors (including fourteen governors of Virginia) and 33 United States senators. UVA students and alumni have founded companies such as Reddit, Skillshare, VMware, and Space Adventures.
Its athletic teams, the Virginia Cavaliers, have twice won the Capital One Cup for overall athletics prowess and compete in NCAA Division I as members of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
History
1800s
In 1802, while serving as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson wrote to artist Charles Willson Peale that his concept of the new university would be "on the most extensive and liberal scale that our circumstances would call for and our faculties meet," and it might even attract talented students from "other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge."Alf J. Mapp, Jr., Thomas Jefferson: Passionate Pilgrim, p. 19. Virginia was already home to the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, but Jefferson lost all confidence in his alma mater, partly because of its religious nature—it required all its students to recite a catechism—and its stifling of the sciences.New Englander and Yale Review, Volume 37, W. L. Kingsley, "Ought the State provide for Higher Education?", 1878, page 378.Phillips Russell, Jefferson, Champion of the Free Mind, p. 335. Jefferson had flourished under William & Mary professors William Small and George Wythe decades earlier, but the college was in a period of great decline and his concern became so dire by 1800 that he expressed to British chemist Joseph Priestley, "we have in that State, a college just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it." These words would ring true some seventy years later when William & Mary fell bankrupt after the Civil War and the Williamsburg college was shuttered completely in 1881, later being revived as primarily a small college for teachers until it regained university status later in the twentieth century.An Act to Establish A Normal School, 5 March 1888 , accessed September 5, 2014 Jefferson envisioned his new university would "be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, p. 417–418. He also pushed for the establishment of the planned university to prevent young Southern men from attending Northern colleges where they might be exposed to anti-slavery sentiment; the historian Leslie M. Harris describes the university as being founded partly as a "pro-slavery bulwark".
In 1817, three presidents (Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison) and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall joined 24 other dignitaries at a meeting held in the Mountain Top Tavern at Rockfish Gap. After some deliberation, they selected nearby Charlottesville as the site of the new University of Virginia. The UVA Board of Visitors purchased just outside Charlottesville a farm that had once been owned by James Monroe. Research conducted for the Ash Lawn-Highland Museum and the Institute for Public History of the University of Virginia in 1998: in 1788-9 George Nicholas had sold the land to James Monroe (without a recorded deed); in 1810 Monroe's attorney sold it to George Divers to pay Monroe's creditors; in 1810 it was resold to John Nicholas; in 1814 resold again to John Perry; and in 1820 the Proctor of the University bought the land from its then-owner John Perry for the University. The Commonwealth of Virginia chartered a new flagship university to be based on the site in Charlottesville on January 25, 1819.
John Hartwell Cocke collaborated with James Madison, Monroe, and Joseph Carrington Cabell to fulfill Jefferson's dream to establish the university. Cocke and Jefferson were appointed to the building committee to supervise the construction. The UVA Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights is continuing to "seek opportunities to engage and acknowledge with respect that we live, learn, and work on [what once was] the territory of the Monacan Indian Nation." Like many of its peers,Colleges come to terms with slave-owning pasts , accessed October 8, 2018 the university owned slaves who helped build the campus. They also served students and professors. The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on Central Grounds was built to memorialize their lives and legacies. The university's first classes met on March 7, 1825.
In contrast to other universities of the day, at which one could study in either medicine, law, or divinity, the first students at the University of Virginia could study in one or several of eight independent schools – medicine, law, mathematics, chemistry, ancient languages, modern languages, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy.Popular Science, July 1905, "The Progress of Science" Another innovation of the new university was that higher education would be separated from religious doctrine. UVA had no divinity school, was established independently of any religious sect, and the Grounds were planned and centered upon a library, the Rotunda, rather than a church, distinguishing it from peer universities still primarily functioning as seminaries for one particular strain of Protestantism or another.Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 283. Jefferson opined to philosopher Thomas Cooper that "a professorship of theology should have no place in our institution","Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 7 October 1814," Founders Online, National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0007 . [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 8, 1 October 1814 to 31 August 1815, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 12–13.] and never has there been one. There were initially two degrees awarded by the university: Graduate, to a student who had completed the courses of one school; and Doctor to a graduate in more than one school who had shown research prowess.
Jefferson was intimately involved in the university to the end, hosting Sunday dinners at his Monticello home for faculty and students. Jefferson viewed the university's foundation as having such great importance and potential that he counted it among his greatest accomplishments and insisted his grave mention only his status as author of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. Thus, he eschewed mention of his national accomplishments, such as the Louisiana Purchase and any other aspects of his presidency, in favor of his role with the young university.
Initially, some of the students arriving at the university matched the then-common picture of college students: wealthy, spoiled aristocrats with a sense of privilege which often led to brawling, or worse. This was a source of frustration for Jefferson, who assembled the students during the school's first year, on October 3, 1825, to criticize such behavior; but was too overcome to speak. He later spoke of this moment as "the most painful event" of his life."Bad Boys ", Virginia, Carlos Santos
Although the frequency of such irresponsible behavior dropped after Jefferson's expression of concern, it did not die away completely. Like many universities and colleges, it experienced periodic student riots, culminating in the shooting death of Professor John A. G. Davis, Chairman of the Faculty, in 1840. This event, in conjunction with the new UVA Honor System and the growing popularity of temperance and a rise in religious affiliation in society in general, seems to have resulted in a permanent change in student attitudes toward reporting the bad behavior, and thus such behavior among students that had so greatly bothered Jefferson finally vanished.
In the year of Jefferson's death in 1826, poet Edgar Allan Poe enrolled at the university, where he excelled in Latin."Edgar Allan Poe at the University ," University of Virginia Library. 2018. Accessed May 19, 2018. The Raven Society, an organization named after Poe's most famous poem, continues to maintain 13 West Range, the room Poe inhabited during the single semester he attended the university."History of the Raven Society ," The Raven Society, 2018. Accessed May 19, 2018. He left because of financial difficulties. The School of Engineering and Applied Science opened in 1836, making UVA the first comprehensive university to open an engineering school.
Unlike the majority of Southern colleges, the university was kept open throughout the Civil War, despite its state seeing more bloodshed than any other and the near 100% conscription of the American South.Civil War Casualties by the Civil War Trust , accessed September 5, 2014 After Jubal Early's total loss at the Battle of Waynesboro, Charlottesville was willingly surrendered to Union forces to avoid mass bloodshed, and UVA faculty convinced George Armstrong Custer to preserve Jefferson's university.Charlottesville During the Civil War , accessed September 5, 2014 Although Union troops camped on the Lawn and damaged many of the Pavilions, Custer's men left four days later without bloodshed and the university was able to return to its educational mission. However, an extremely high number of officers of both Confederacy and Union were alumni.University of Virginia Alumni News, Volume II, Issue 7, page 74, December 10, 1913. Accessed September 5, 2014 UVA produced 1,481 officers in the Confederate Army alone, including four major-generals, twenty-one brigadier-generals, and sixty-seven colonels from ten different states. John S. Mosby, the infamous "Gray Ghost" and commander of the lightning-fast 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry ranger unit, had also been a UVA student.
Thanks to a grant from the Commonwealth of Virginia, tuition became free for all Virginians in the year 1875.See wikisource link to the right During this period, the University of Virginia remained unique in that it had no president and mandated no core curriculum from its students, who often studied in and took degrees from more than one school. However, the university was also experiencing growing pains. As the original Rotunda caught fire and was gutted in 1895, there would soon be sweeping changes, much greater than merely reconstructing the Rotunda in 1899.
1900s