LIKE ALL successful institutions, great universities must have distinctive identities. Harvard and Yale have their Ivy League pedigrees; Berkeley has its counterculture past; North Carolina and Duke have their great basketball teams. The University, located in a small town in rural central Virginia, has Thomas Jefferson. The University, of course, was the brainchild of Jefferson and one of his proudest achievements. The history of the University is inextricably tied to Jefferson the human being. Recent ambivalence about Jefferson's legacy, however, should not lead the University to move away from the powerful symbolism Jefferson's life provides.
Indeed, it is easy as students to forget just how little the national population knows of Charlottesville and the University. Charlottesville and the University are almost synonymous with Jefferson to outsiders who know of either. Charlottesville regularly ranks as a top tourist attraction and retirement haven precisely because of its Jeffersonian heritage.
However, the past few years have seen a sort of refocusing of Jefferson's legacy at the University. University spokesperson Carol Wood said in an interview that, as a result of a series of focus groups and discussions with students, alumni and other members of the University community, the University in recent years has begun to become more sensitive to varied individual reactions to Jefferson as a person. Wood says that the surveys often found ambivalence about Jefferson among not just minority groups, but people of a wide variety of backgrounds. With the University's efforts to recruit more low-income and minority students, the University has shifted from a focus on Jefferson as a person to a broader focus on "Jeffersonian ideals" and a focus on the distinctive University campus. The University has hired a marketing agency to look into the results of the University's surveys. Wood admitted, however, that the views of those outside the University community were not polled.
Some comments at a recent Board of Visitors meeting concerning marketing of the University suggested a disinclination to use Jefferson to promote the University. Wood emphasized that these sentiments were not meant "in a negative way," but to stress that the University should be aware of its use of Jefferson.
The thrust of these comments reflects, in some way, the impact of the acknowledgment over the past decade of Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemmings, as well as awareness of Jefferson's slaveholding generally. But Jefferson was not unique in his racism. Well into the nineteenth century, many Northern states still had slavery, and until ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, all Northern states had laws severely restricting the most basic rights of their black citizens. As unfortunate as America's racial past may be, we cannot whitewash it. We can, however, celebrate positive aspects of our past in a way that is not reactionary.
Jefferson's legacy has always oscillated with the prevailing sentiments of the times. The reason that Jefferson continues to attract so much positive attention and adoration, however, is the distinctively scholarly nature of his personal life. Jefferson's Monticello continues to be seen as a bastion of scholarly dedication, with its great libraries and obsessive attention to detail. Jefferson, who pursued a whole array of subject fields, seems to represent the highest ideals of republican politics: the scholar-president, whose political ideals grow out of his academic pursuits. Jefferson was a slaveholder, but he closely considered the implications of slavery and decided that it was morally wrong. If his personal life did not live up to his ideals, he remains a powerful archetype. It is the prestige of Jefferson's distinctively American Enlightenment ideals that attracts visitors to Monticello each year and that the University should seek to capitalize on as it attracts new students.
Jefferson's legacy, reflecting as it does the open pursuit of knowledge in the spirit of the Enlightenment, does not have to be divisive, even if we acknowledge Jefferson's failings. The University should not set aside the powerful image of Jefferson the man as it seeks to enhance the image of its academic prestige.
Noah Peters' column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at npeters@cavalierdaily.com.
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