University of Virginia
The University of 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. 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, Marshall Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, and 57 Rhodes Scholars—the most of any state university. Its alumni include 31 state governors 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." 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. 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. 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."In 1817, three presidents 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. 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 the territory of the Monacan Indian Nation." Like many of its peers, 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. 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. Jefferson opined to philosopher Thomas Cooper that "a professorship of theology should have no place in our institution", 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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
Jefferson had originally decided the University of Virginia would have no serving president. Rather, this power was to be shared by a rector and the Board of Visitors. But as the 19th century waned, it became obvious this cumbersome arrangement was incapable of adequately handling the many administrative and fundraising tasks of the growing university. Edwin Alderman, who had only recently moved from his post as president of UNC-Chapel Hill since 1896 to become president of Tulane University in 1900, accepted an offer as president of the University of Virginia in 1904. His appointment was not without controversy, and national media such as Popular Science lamented the end of one of the things that made UVA unique among universities.Alderman stayed 27 years, and became known as a prolific fund-raiser, a well-known orator, and a close adviser to U.S. president and UVA alumnus Woodrow Wilson. He added significantly to the University Hospital to support new sickbeds and public health research, and helped create departments of geology and forestry, the School of Education and Human Development, the McIntire School of Commerce, and the summer school programs in which young Georgia O'Keeffe took part. Perhaps his greatest ambition was the funding and construction of a library on a scale of millions of books, much larger than the Rotunda could bear. Delayed by the Great Depression, Alderman Library was named in his honor in 1938. Alderman, who seven years earlier had died in office en route to giving a public speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, is still the longest-tenured president of the university.
In 1904, UVA became the first university south of Washington, D.C. to be elected to the Association of American Universities. After a gift by Andrew Carnegie in 1909 the University of Virginia was organized into twenty-six departments across six schools including the Andrew Carnegie School of Engineering, the James Madison School of Law, the James Monroe School of International Law, the James Wilson School of Political Economy, the Edgar Allan Poe School of English and the Walter Reed School of Pathology. The honorific historical names for these schools – several of which have remained as modern [|schools of the university] – are no longer used.
In December 1953, the University of Virginia joined the Atlantic Coast Conference for athletics. At the time, UVA had a football program that had just broken through to be nationally ranked in 1950, 1951, and 1952, and consistently beat its rivals North Carolina and Virginia Tech by scores such as 34–7 and 44–0. Other sports were very competitive as well. However, the administration of Colgate Darden de-emphasized athletics, defunding the department and declining to join the ACC before being overruled by the Board of Visitors on that decision. It would take until the 1980s for the bulk of athletics programs to fully recover but approaching the year 2000 UVA was again one of the [|most successful all-around sports programs] with NCAA national titles achieved in an array of different sports; by 2020, it had twice won the Capital One Cup for overall athletics excellence in men's sports programs.
UVA established a junior college in 1954, known today as the University of Virginia's College at Wise. George Mason University and Mary Washington University used to similarly exist as UVA's satellite campuses, but those are now wholly independent universities no longer administered by the University of Virginia.
The Academical Village and nearby Monticello became a joint World Heritage Site in 1987. Simultaneously with Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park and Chaco Culture National Historical Park, they were the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth U.S. sites designated as culturally significant to the collective interests of global humanity, coming after the Statue of Liberty and Yosemite National Park three years earlier. As such, UVA possesses the only U.S. collegiate grounds to be internationally protected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.