A Founding Father's Final Lesson
	Think today's students are wild? Meet the party animals of 1825
	By AMEY ADKINS

Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004
In what would prove to be the next to last year of his life, Thomas Jefferson looked forward to the first day of school. Finally, after a decade of toil, years of construction delays and the late arrivals of professors recruited from Europe, the moment had come. To the delight of Jefferson, the University of Virginia welcomed students in March 1825. Jefferson had designed the buildings, selected books for courses and even surveyed the site himself. The first class of 68 came primarily from Southern plantations, while 5 of the 8 professors were European. The students found themselves in an environment unlike any other college in the new nation. Students and teachers lived as neighbors in two colonnades of simple dormitory rooms and two-storey houses (Jefferson's Pavilions) with a long, open lawn in the middle. Professors taught classes on the ground floor of their Pavilion homes. U.Va. had no religious affiliation, an elective course system, lectures instead of recitations, and written exams when students felt they were ready. Each Sunday Jefferson served the students dinner at Monticello, reaffirming his dream of the "Academical Village" — a place where a community of intellect would form. "This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind," Jefferson decreed. "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."

Those eloquent words, however, carry a lot less weight when you've been drinking — and many of the first U.Va. students were drunk a lot of the time. The favorite pastimes of the new scholars included gambling, rioting, and "calathumps" — wild gun-toting night raids of the professors' Pavilions. As a result, Jefferson was forced to help establish a painstaking code of conduct to temper the freedom of student self-governance. Jefferson called a meeting of the student body and attended with James Madison and James Monroe. He tried to address the session, but was overcome by emotion and wept. He later compared his efforts to enhance public education as "the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it." Yet Jefferson asked for only three things to be included in his epitaph: that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and "Father of the University of Virginia." He died the year after the university opened. One has to wonder whether the institution he recalled so fondly on his tombstone helped drive him into the grave beneath it.

Though a code of ethics was in place, Jefferson's death only further incited the students' recklessness. In November 1840, a masked student shot and killed law professor John A. G. Davis in front of his home, Pavilion X. The brutality of this event transformed the attitudes of many students and sparked the creation of the oldest student-run Honor System in the country. Since that event, students at U.Va. adhere to the code which forbids lying, cheating, and stealing. Violators of the code are penalized with expulsion. Students now fully embrace and govern every aspect of the system, conducting "honor trials" of those who have violated the code.

Today, UVA's grounds are home to over 19,000 students. Officially dubbed the Cavaliers, but colloquially known as the Wahoos— a fish that reportedly can drink twice its own weight each day — U.Va. students definitely know how to play as hard as they work. The difference now is that academic rigor, intellectual enterprise, personal growth, and learning have all been added to the list of student priorities— according to U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings, the University is tied with UC-Berkeley as the top public school in the nation. Jefferson founded U.Va., in part, because he felt established schools were mired in the past. "Science is progressive," he wrote. "What was useful two centuries ago is now become useless; e.g., one half of the professorships of William and Mary." What would the Sage of Monticello say if he walked the campus today? At the time of U.Va.'s founding there were no black or female students. What would he say if he saw female students playing frisbee on the lawn? If he saw black, brown and white faces, studying side by side in Alderman Library? If he knew that diversity was a core value of the University community?

Perhaps he would understand that time, and universities, must move on. Jefferson once said of his students: "A finer set of youths I never saw assembled for instruction. They committed some irregularities at first, until they learned the lawful length of their tether; since which it has never been transgressed in the smallest degree." Well, maybe a couple degrees. But the man who authored the Declaration of Independence certainly understood that freedom, for students or countries, can be a difficult thing to master.

Adkins is a student at the University of Virginia, class of 2005, and a writer for the Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper

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