 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Andrew O'Shaughnessy about his new book, The Eliminable Freedom of the Human Mind, which looks at Thomas Jefferson in retirement and his role as founder of the University of Virginia. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view next month on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, October 6th at 1 p.m., Jonathan White will discuss a compelling collection of more than 120 letters from African Americans to Abraham Lincoln in White's new book to address you as my friend. And on Thursday, October 14th at 1 p.m., Woody Holton will discuss his book, Liberty is Sweet, a reassessment of the American Revolution that looks at how the founders were influenced by women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Nearly two decades before the official founding of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote to artist Charles Wilson Peele in January 1802, I have for a considerable time been meditating a plan of a general university for the state of Virginia on the most extensive and liberal scale that our circumstances would call for. Jefferson considered the university to be one of his three greatest achievements, with the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. In his post-presidential years, he was able to devote himself to fulfilling the dream of an academic village. Today we'll hear from Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy about Jefferson's aspirations for his university. His book is a twin biography of Jefferson in retirement and of the University of Virginia's first years. In seeking to understand figures from the past, the ability to read their own recorded thoughts is immensely valuable. Today's author Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy used Founders Online in researching this book. Founders Online, a website hosted by the National Archives through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, has transcriptions of thousands of documents written by and to the nation's founders. Jefferson's letter to Peel is easily accessible on Founders Online, and that portal also gives us the context for the title of today's book. In an 1820 letter at the end of a proud description of the new university, Jefferson told his correspondent, this institution will be based on the Eliminable 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. Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy is Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. His previous books include An Empire Divided, The American Revolution, and The British Caribbean, and The Men Who Lost America. Joining him in conversation is Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Now let's hear from Andrew O'Shaughnessy and Holly Brewer. Thank you for joining us today. Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming. I think this is going to be a very fun conversation about a terrific book and an important topic that continues to be relevant and powerful. And most particularly the questions are about what is the legacy of the American Revolution, what does it mean in terms of citizenship on especially higher education, and how should we be understanding conflicts over ideals versus realities in the complex atmosphere of the New Republic. But education is currently, and especially higher education, is currently very strongly educated. To what extent has it's the found, you know, the universities that were founded in the wake of the Revolution in particular, to what extent were they tainted or compromised by questions of slavery, and those questions have particularly surrounded the founding of the University of Virginia as it mirrors its 200th anniversary. I guess it's just passed it, right Andrew? Well it's somewhat arbitrary. In 2019 they celebrated the year that the bill was passed to create the University of Virginia, but in actual fact it's a rolling anniversary. So 2025 will be the bicentenary of the very first students at the University. And when it opened its doors, I should have had this book out for 2019 but I feel that it's still relevant to that bicentenary. I wrote it feeling that this is much more important than the University of Virginia. It's alumni and it's students. I think there are lessons in this book and insights that are relevant to any of us interested in our education and education more generally. It's such a creative vision that it's useful to engage with as we think today about the purpose of the University and the role of the University. So when I talk about education and the impact of the revolution on education, I always emphasize briefly to my students that there wasn't much public education before the revolution. In Massachusetts a little bit of grammar school for especially aimed at moving the Bible, but outside of Massachusetts and a few other places normally you had to be wealthy to get an education. Everything cost quite a bit of money. There wasn't much funding by the state if you want to call it that. And that we should think of public education as a consequence in part of the American Revolution although a hard fought one. What is Jefferson's role in pushing for education in Virginia and generally and what is his general impact on the American conversation after the revolution? Well the Ruth is really no other founder who was so engaged in the idea of creating a university and I see the American Revolution really as the origins of that. He initially was interested in reforming William and Mary, but the university was just the apex of this much broader educational vision that I think very remarkable for the time. It took the form of a bill in 1779 for the general diffusion of knowledge in Virginia and this would have really created the first public school system. As you rightly know Massachusetts and Connecticut had very high rates of literacy and large numbers of schools thanks to the Puritans later Congregationalists and Presbyterians who wanted to have a school in every town so that peoples could read the Bible. But it was not an entirely systematic public school system. Scotland for the same reasons as New England and Connecticut. Prussia and some of the autocratic countries were issuing decrees for a public school education system but that wasn't realized in Prussia until the early 19th century. So Jefferson's bill had passed which would have given both boys and girls an education for three years of basic primary school education and as he told a Quaker abolitionist in the early 1790s the bill did not specifically exclude free African Americans although he suspected that the way it would be interpreted by his fellow planters would result in that. But it was a very enlightened measure. I do point out in this book the Elimitable Freedom of the Human Mind which is literally just out. I point out there's a real difference between what he was doing and what Prussia was doing in Prussia and these what are sometimes called enlightened despotisms they were interested in strengthening the state by training bureaucrats and government functionaries. Jefferson was as much interested in educating people to hold the government accountable and he felt it essential for the survival of the republican system about which he was paranoid or would be seen so today because he was very aware historically that all republics had failed. I think it's a very brittle system that usually they resulted in a military coup in civil war and he saw education as we'd still do to some extent as the panacea against that. He was also interested in creating what he called a natural aristocracy which was different from a European aristocracy in that it essentially saw it as based on merit and educated elite and what he hoped was that they would go to one of these top universities and that they would be in terms of the time virtuous. They put their self-interest aside and looked to the public good but he was always quite cynical about that and he insisted throughout his life that what was most important was actually the public school system that it would be better if you had to choose to have the population largely educated rather than just a few. So far from being utterly elitist he recognized the importance of popular education. It's ironic that he ended up just serving the elites and creating the university but the fact is he tried several times in 1817 and 1821 with very similar bills to introduce public education. One of the reasons he kept failing and why he opposed the public education bill of a political opponent was he was utterly opposed to any kind of religious education and he saw that as actually mandated by his Virginia statute for religious freedom. He wouldn't even have clergy teaching in the schools at a time when education everywhere was dominated by different religious denominations and we should give credit to the fact that the whole evolution of universities was due initially to the catholic church and that a lot of our ceremonies and expressions come from like the expression of the term dean or rector even the wearing of roads even the degree ceremony some of the older ones have the laying on their hands these come from religious traditions. Right you've talked about a lot there I want to piece apart some of those threads but can I just pause for a minute and I wanted to remind you of a quote which you no doubt now from more than a century before visor William Berkeley governor of Virginia in 1671 who in answer to a question from the authorities in Britain in England said I thank god there are no free schools nor printing and I hope you shall not have these hundred years for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world that is s e s s e cts that religious sex into the world and printing has devolved them and libels against the best governments god keep us from both what do you think Jefferson would have had to say to Berkeley and do you think some of that sentiment that Berkeley expressed still existed in Virginia a century later I love that quote it's one of my favorites you know that education essentially opens Pandora's box and leads to anarchy yeah of course Jefferson would have deployed it he would have deployed Berkeley as a royalist and a cavalier ironically the university sports teams now known as the cavalier though really the royalists who fought against parliament so I've always seen the term it's almost subversive by students of Jefferson's round head parliamentary vision but you're quite right cavalier tradition continued ironically elite Virginians like to think of themselves as the descendants of cavalier as the descendants of English aristocrats as opposed to the Puritan round heads in the north because many of those who went to Massachusetts and the great great migration in the 1620s went to escape Charles the first and the what's known as the period of personal rule by the monarchy and the virginian elite though loved to think of themselves as aristocrats there's a small grain of truth in the idea even though a lot in fact were descended from indentured servants and even convicts the you know the only British lord to move the Americas was Lord Fairfax and they actually used to own one of the most splendid castles his castle in England which is not in the city of Leeds it's much further south and has a moat and is often used by the tourist authority and they were the people who were the patrons of George Washington so there were enough real cavaliers and to some extent an anti-intellectual tradition and anti-education remained this was another reason why Jefferson couldn't get his education bills passed they simply weren't willing to expend that amount of money and he was quite desperate by the early 19th century because he recognized that Virginia was falling behind places like New York and Massachusetts and that it was especially behind in education so you know I'm sure you know that at the debates over the a new constitution for Virginia in 1830 one of the worries one of the open concerns expressed about expanding the suffrage to um free white adult men was that then they would all vote for free public education because this is actually he did share in 1830 even then and the elite weren't necessarily willing to pay for it but they were willing to fund at least in part in this literary funds which set up an annual payment of I think $15,000 a year a show um they were willing to fund this institution for for a university um but how did that fit with an American republic I mean in famous correspond in famous letter that he wrote to Adams in 1813 he talks about an aristocracy of virtue and talent what did he mean by that and how how what was he arguing with Adams about and how did that fit into his vision for the university well they in many ways had different ideas of what an aristocracy talent meant John Adams was always much more a pessimist and felt that you would always get an aristocracy in society and they may not have titles it may not be in the context of the monarchy but you would get these very wealthy people whose differences were in odds with the population a large and who would pursue their self-interest to the detriment of the others and to the public good um Jefferson certainly recognized the danger of that I think it's not an entirely utopian but he did believe that by having real competition um in the University of Virginia it was one of the first in America to have an examination system although he doesn't use the language of merit which is one of my former colleagues here at the university shows is a language that actually comes in very much later and the whole notion of merit is a complicated one not least is people have such different levels of opportunity based on their background race and gender but still there is a notion of with Jefferson not of pure elitism um I'm one of the most impressive features of his vision is that he does say that sir very poor are capable of producing talent he wanted scholarships at the university and that so the poorest could potentially be part of the uh natural aristocracy right and that was based in part too on his overall plan that would have included Republic education and those who did well could be could be moved into more you know could be pushed up the the scale of education so um and yet the worst color were there scholarships I mean I've seen what I remember reading in your book is that the tuition ended up being higher than a lot of other colleges across the country 75 a year now seems really cheap but of course then it wasn't quite as cheap do you think it actually worked in the first few years to um promote an aristocracy of rich human talent or did it actually promote the more traditional um wealthy hereditary leaders of Virginia who already started with their but put in the syrup as it were well like his other great project the Declaration of Independence uh it was flawed and as you said in your introduction it was obviously like all colleges in the south had the blemish the presence of slavery and although he had wanted to have scholarships they were not introduced until about 20 years later and then only a very few often and his critics of whom there are many uh argue that actually the number of scholarships contained in his bill for the general diffusion of knowledge and his later bills was very very small although they don't take into account political feasibility we always hold Jefferson to absolute standards we forget he was a politician uh his bills his bills don't necessarily represent what he would most like to do the point right especially in their final form right it was very keen that this should be a public university and that there should be a public school system uh and it's certainly represented a move in the right direction in terms of opportunities for the uh larger populace right so can we explore this question of slavery a little bit more there's been there's been several recent books and also the report that was generated by the um University of Virginia South in 2018 here I'm thinking about books by um by especially McGinnis and Nelson educated in tyranny and Alan Taylor's recent book um which have argued that you know you know you know let's be honest there was a full lot of just playing celebration of the University of Virginia for a long time and not much criticism about about its connection with slavery not even much exploration of that topic there's now University of Virginia has joined many other universities including my own the University of Maryland in exploring more some of the connections to slavery and its origins from the role that slaves played in actually building the buildings um I remember saying at the University of Mississippi the hand prints on one of the bricks and one of the slaves um enslaved people who who left that print um from building the buildings to the fact that they were serving as you know they were servants to some of the the students and to the professors they were they were enslaved sometimes hired out um to the you know so there's there's been this big exploration going on and these books have pushed back and said almost um almost that the reason for this founding was to perpetuate slavery could you talk about why you what your opinion is about that I mean I read you were saying that that is misguided that is that is um misleading in terms of what the University of Virginia was all about can you explain more yes um I would say from the outset and most of these books came out during the bicentenary of the university in 2019 uh preceded by the commission on slavery for the university and they do represent a very important corrective to earlier work uh in acknowledging the presence of slavery and it's unbelievable now that earlier history is really just didn't discuss this feature of the university or only uh tangentially and I profited a lot from these books and I incorporate uh their insights and information where I disagree with them is where they give a causal role to slavery in Jefferson's motivation to create the University of Virginia I can see why they do it because Jefferson's constantly talking about the major reason to have a a university at University of Virginia so that our pupils will not go north and be contaminated by what he calls the poisonous ideas in the north uh the problem with though thinking that this is just code for slavery is that firstly in the uh 1780s and 1790s when he's first embarked on a project to create a major university in Virginia and basically to transform the College of William and Mary uh what divided the north and south most was not a debate on slavery I mean the historians uh argue even during the constitution this debate was ongoing but it was a debate really on the uh how one represented the enslaved population in terms of electoral college votes and uh the voting numbers votes in the south what are that the south could keep this historical uh dominance over the north and would dominate the presidency and the uh senate much like the sort of game we continue to play but in terms of real abolitionism and the major abolitionist movement that was very slow although it occurred after the american revolution it was slow to rise there were other major issues like the tariff uh southerners really resented paying the tariff to uh import goods from england because they imported so much and it was protecting northern manufacturers the banking system uh and the credit system these were issues between the north and south the real issue the real poison for jefferson was firstly that most of the educational system and all of it in the north was dominated by his political opponents federally and most of the educational system was also dominated by presbyterians even universities and colleges and south uh uh a lot of them were uh created and set up by federalist presbyterians and certainly all of them were religious colleges except for transylvania and the university of north carolina which experimented with secular education but they didn't continue it and it's very interesting to me that he first mentions name and i don't think anyone who's made this connection he first mentions the name the university of virginia and his desire to create the university interestingly enough to the unitarian british radical political refugee josep priestly with whom he is largely discussing religious ideas it's to him that he says he wants to found the university the significance of the year 1800 is that he was engaged in the most bruising election presidential election almost in our history and compares very much almost with the even the civil war and um one of the things that hurt jefferson most was the attack upon him and the accusations of being uh a radical of being uh an atheist uh claims that he would make everyone sing the char kari came uh president you know the anthem of the french revolution he bitterly resented these attacks and some of the worst attacks actually came from presidents of northern universities who were also at the same time clerics uh perhaps the most outspoken was timothy dwight the president of yelp and uh he went as far in 1802 as telling his students that they should take it both never to vote for jefferson uh he thought it was a real problem for the republic to be dominated by his political opponents because he believed only his party was going to save america and save the true tradition of 1776 he thought that the federalists were going to turn the place into a monarchy that they'd reintroduce real aristocracy they'd make britain america just a satellite of britain so so literal hereditary aristocracy like in the senate or whatever um so it has awards of course at that time and in fact until 1999 astonishingly was a hereditary body which is the comparable and there were some like john adams by 1813 so but let's push just a little bit more on this question of slavery so i was reading some of the letters that are cited in that report from 2018 and and by elin taylor and by you such as a letter from thomas jackerson to james breckenridge 15th of february 1821 and the very famous letter to john holmes on 22nd of april 1820 both of which are um as the archivist was pointing out in his introduction available in um founders online so anyone here can find those letters and read them for yourself and it seems to me you're right that um at least in the letter of 1821 that he jefferson does talk about northern seminaries as being a problem and um essentially our sons imbibing opinions and principles in discord with those of our own country but it's not at all clear that he necessarily means you know strong anti-slavers i think you could make an argument that he was worried they might become insurrectionists on the lines of later insurrectionists such as john brown but when you read something like his letter to john holmes in 1820 and so much of jefferson's other writing he's he supports emancipation i mean he's worried he's fearful of the possibilities of insurrection his whole great 1782 where he says in his notes on the state of virginia section on manner and he says that essentially god would side with the slaves if there were an insurrection because there's just the cause of justice right so he's really worried that that would happen but i'm gonna have you over and over again he says um he says he supports gradual emancipation especially with colonization um can you talk a little bit more i mean i was i was stunned especially by what you found about him writing a letter saying he would have supported he wished he'd included support for free black children to be educated yes what really is he just torn where do they stand on all this you have wonderful discussion of his correspondence with bannaker and others where where do you where do you think he stands from these questions well let me begin with the first part of the question uh and instantly the national archives uh the founders online is an immensely useful source and any of our viewers today who come across a jefferson quote if they are uh doubtful about it if they just put it in google it should immediately bring up one of these letters and if it doesn't right you then uh you're pretty you can be pretty sure it's wrong or you can go on to the monticello dot org uh and find misquotes from jefferson but you're quite right um the letters you talked about in the beginning were letters written at the height of the missouri crisis as you know this was the great debate about whether to allow missouri into the union as a free state or a slave state and in some ways it's the first real issue that seems to start splitting north and south on the issue of slavery we talk about the missouri crisis of 1820 and it continues into 1821 and jefferson writes what are these seemingly the very anxious letters to various people one of the most famous phrases he says that this is like a far bell in the night um and uh he does seem to envisage possibly the breakup of the uh union what i would stress is that these letters are written when the university is almost fully clean and when the university commission report uh makes the statement that jefferson and this got repeated in the guardian uh in the atlantic the washington post along with a number of the more polemical claims in that report um much of it provided just good basic information um but uh in supporting that contention jefferson uh founded the university to protect and expand slavery it gives this letter to breckenridge uh which as you say uh you know by no means clenches that uh argument uh indeed a very good historian poskul steward libiger um arguing that actually jefferson was writing breckenridge as a political opponent basically wanting to uh get his support for the remaining funding of the university and that as soon as he got that money suddenly he seemed to relax the Missouri crisis and no longer to uh to worry about it um but in terms of his general views on slavery and on race uh and which of his views on race i think are um even more indefensible although they do reflect uh views common in both north and the south at the time but nevertheless he does shift in his uh views um there's always a sense of doubt and of uh possibility i mean it is interesting that he said you couldn't possibly have a racially intermixed society and notes on the state of virginia and yet uh in the last month of his life he signs will uh freeing the remaining sons of sally hemmings and also sends an appeal petition to the virginia legislature that they've been allowed to remain in virginia and that the law insisting that free african americans leave the state recently emancipated would be waived in their favor and there are letters in which he talks about the possibility of uh of the sort of equal intellectual ability and you know he acknowledges that our view uh our low estimate uh is based on uh people who have never had the advantages uh and in that sense are not um comparable on the other hand he does just dismiss benjamin bank bannaker ultimately uh and having been quite polite in his correspondence bannaker was a african american uh mathematician who corresponded with him and asked i think what every african american and indeed modern uh many modern historians would love to ask him how could you write all men are created equal um and yet you know you're honored bound to uh make that more of uh a reality right buddy to someone else uh right about uh bannaker's ability even suggesting that it was just his white um right authors who made him look uh good despite that bannaker had worked on the design from dc and building it and and the almanac as well yes which had complex complex mathematical curriculum which he did in fact send it to condor say in france by the way i don't think he noted that but it is they it is there among the records so the editor of the integrity so it is interesting that he sent the acrobat he did do what he said that's the meaning probably um it all indicates to me sorry go ahead i see him as often conflicted yeah i do as well i mean particularly in terms of his own ownership of enslaved people i i i i always think it's important to emphasize that um he inherited quite a lot of those enslaved people from his father in law but also with a lot of debts and the manumission laws and in virginia said that you had to be free of debt before you could free people so it it was it was actually a more complex situation than sometimes is about um but i'd like to turn our attention to another issue that you raised earlier in passing and that is the religious issue and i want to in in dealing with this issue not only think about why jefferson would have been so opposed to having a university that primarily taught religion as william and mary had done but why why he cared so much about religion in general and when i talk about this with my students one of the things i emphasize is that the church the church of england which jefferson grew up with him the head of that church was the king of england and every church service and in fact every meeting of the house of vertices would have involved oaths of allegiance you know undying allegiance to hereditary monarchs and this of course became a real issue with the revolution and also teachings of passive obedience or embedded in the book of common prayer um and and yet i mean to me it sort of gets at the heart of two kinds of issues one of them and i'm and i just was thinking maybe you could explain this a little bit not his purpose for the university but one of them is that having universities that focus so much on religion aren't in fact compatible with teaching freedom or teaching independence or consent potentially the second of them is a question of governance so well you know i'll hold this for just a second we'll get back to this at the very end yeah go ahead well he saw political freedom and religious freedom as essential for intellectual freedom his great fear with religious colleges was not so much religion itself he was claimed to not to be an atheist and to be religious you know he said i am a christian in the way that i understand the term essentially which in fact would be alien to most modern christians because he didn't believe in fundamentals like the trinity but i mean his great fear was actually denominational control you know individual religions like presbyterianism interestingly he was less fearful of the baptists and the quakers but they were not nearly as engaged in the project of founding colleges and schools the presbyterians it was very important to them because they believed in having an educated clergy and you know the same is costrued the catholic church and the church of england and he felt that firstly such colleges were less open to new kinds sources of information and ideas especially science which to some extent was true and they're more concerned with tradition and less concerned with basing knowledge purely on demonstratable facts and what we call empirical knowledge and he also felt that they all had their own kinds of bigotry that were groundless and based on misreadings of the bible on years of adding what he called accretions to the bible the year that the bill went through to found the university of virginia he started this remarkable project of and you can see the project in the library of congress where he did what people now call the jefferson bible it is otherwise known as life morals of jesus on this project as president in which he would put he'd basically cut and paste the gospels and remove every passage that he felt was false anything that involved a miracle and he basically juiced it down to the teachings of jesus which was an early name for it and he did it in four different languages columns side by side you have to say that it was a remarkable project not only showing his skill in languages but what we would call modern day hermeneutics a text critically right i was fascinated by your discussion there and i think he i have written about it i haven't published it but um lock's last work was also commentary on the bible which was also hermeneutics in some of the same way and um it's it's really important to recognize i think that some of the passages you know passages from the bible as they were interpreted in the early 19th century for example were used to justify hierarchy obedience slavery etc especially passages from for example paul and they noticed that in in the jefferson it's completely excised paul from all from his you know so it's really i actually went and looked it up after reading your discussion really fascinating but so finally i just we have just a few minutes and then i think we're going to take questions but i wanted to to push on something that i find fascinating you didn't dwell on but um but you do talk about um and that is why did he gave up on William and Mary because there were six faculty members there all of him had some sort of religious background they were pointed as you know ministers which had been the traditional purpose of most education including William and Mary but they had control over who next got hired and so he didn't feel like he could just he couldn't just um he couldn't just um fire the six faculty members he he had to rely on them to choose their replacements and he couldn't he didn't feel like he could get scientists in a medical school and a law faculty and other things that he wanted and and that was why he gave up on William and Mary but um obviously the new school starting from scratch the the the um board of directors the board of governors um which was chosen supposed to be chosen by the legislature and i guess he had more saying it too but they could choose who the faculty members were but then the faculty members had a lot of authority in this initial vision they were and he the way he describes it in your you talk about this in your book is the faculty members at the university region you were supposed to be the executive branch and the board of the um the board of directors the board of governors was the what is it called it for UVA again it's is it board of governors the board of visitors board of visitors was supposed to represent the legislature so he's gotten this sort of balance of power thing going on but there's no space in that balance of power for administrators and we live in a world now where in the 21st century here at the University of Maryland faculty have no control over where who gets you know which departments get lines or um where you know where the money goes or etc it's all in the hands of administrators i guess you could say what would Jefferson think about that but more importantly how has that initial vision of the faculty really running their own school with advice from a university board um how does that change over time and um do you think that this is a good change um you know firstly i think one of the reasons we've not fully recognized Jefferson's extraordinary achievement and the novelty of a lot of what he did and how it impacted our education in America generally is we now take uh some of his key ideas like a secular university elective curriculum where students choose courses from and uh we take those now for granted well other ideas that he had we we've abandoned and i say we i mean the University of Virginia has abandoned and one of those was faculty self-governance uh the university didn't have a president until 1900 so much of its first 100 years was actually uh with a chairman chairman of the faculty running the university it was a rotating chair of the governor uh Virginia they they made it automatic so everyone had to do at time they recognized after a while not even cut out to check and so uh it became an elective um system uh but i think it's worth recognizing uh that i cannot think of any head of any state in any time period who spent so long thinking about the creation of a university and Jefferson uh i doubt if any other president was so concerned about faculty i'm somewhat ironic that uh a lot of faculty today so detest the men and are so virulent against him because uh he wanted the faculty at the University of Virginia to be the best paid faculty in america and they were uh then uh Harvard uh he designed the university of course he was its architect and uh he built well known as pavilions for the faculty and i can assure you any modern day faculty members they were often this as faculty accommodation would think that it was uh wonderful i i mean one of the few universities that still has real faculty governance is oxford and uh and Cambridge uh where essentially the fellows the college are largely self-governing uh and the central university still has quite a small um administration i personally was liked because you're then guaranteed of having people with real academic values on the other hand people within it oxford were criticizing it all the time because it was somewhat like uh the running of america at the hospitals and confederation uh it's just doing their own thing it's difficult to get people on the same page and to get any central reform or changes uh i was very i think it was alex von Humboldt who said that uh and he was the great german educational reformer that uh having a faculty uh running a university uh and this is rather sort of hierarchical european is like having the animals run the zoo well i get that but i also think there should be checks and balances and it strikes me that we've lost many of the checks and balances nowadays so um i was just so so interested in what you wrote about yes about this governance jefferson's view of proper governance of the university um can we talk just a little bit more about what was to be taught at the university of virginia i mean obviously there were limits to what electives people could choose um in jefferson as you point out organized his library in a particular way to emphasize history which is memory and philosophy right which is also law and literature or imagination and that didn't seem to correspond exactly to what i could see about the courses that were supposed to be taught i mean any rights in the notes in the state of virginia to emphasize how important history is and um all of this was a big break away from what had been taught in older universities so i just not to be to put too fine a point on it but cambridge university for example just found a notes of one of newton's debates when he was in college which was on the question of free will versus divine divine control so it was you know so much you know so here's this major scientists growing up within this out and jefferson wanted to break away but how did how did the courses that were actually taught at the university correspond to jefferson's ideas about you know history and literature well i was very innovative both in the kind of course structure and offerings and also uh in pedagogy and how those courses were taught um the very decision to call university a university was a big one uh i've you know there were very few places in america at the time they called themselves universities uh i mean somewhere like columbia was still known as columbia college um and uh simley south carolina was south carolina college and did it was difficult to keep using the original terms for more readers i sometimes deliberately transport put something in brackets um his idea of a university is it basically taught everything it should try and be as universal in knowledge as possible uh many people today tend to think of jefferson as someone who's pushing something like modern stem you know science technology engineering mathematics um and uh that actually is an error and what was innovative is he really wanted to teach the pure sciences that you know chemistry were often not being taught in other universities um this was one of the first universities to teach economics but he also argued that learning anglo-saxon was essential and spent a lot of time writing out the reading list for an anglo-saxon course uh he believed in the teaching of modern languages few universities fought modern languages and what was so distinctive about is he was breaking away from the old classical model basically teaching the classics and only two years after jefferson died in 1828 yale issued a report anything coming from yale was important that was the most influential university in america at the time in more college presidents and any university at the time and yale basically said we should go back to the classics but yale and practice yale and practice did start offering science nevertheless the scientist was segregated it was known as a shift they were put in a special place in chapel uh as you know rather made to feel inferior even though it had some very scientists as you know uh that was not the case in jefferson the word science in this period is used very broadly and it's more about methodology system of knowledge based on fact and that's an observation right yes that's right and experimentation i was i was thinking a lot about the medical school there at EVA which became very prominent quickly and was very important and and how it all but how it also illuminates both the inspired and forward-looking nature of jefferson's vision but also the ways in which sometimes quietly that became imbricated with slavery and with racism in and so one of the chapters in um in one of the books that you're you're criticizing in part by um my mcginneson nelson educated in tyranny is about the operating theater and the fact that regularly for medical students to understand how the human body worked they needed in out of you know bodies corpses and how they were you know sometimes going and stealing the bodies of people enslaved people who are recently buried on nearby plantations in order to use them sometimes paying masters etc um would you say that that is like the fact that sort of quiet way in which slavery became a part of the way the lessons were done um the fact that the students were all white we do say that that that is that sort of captures some of the the tension at UVA in the early 19th century on these questions or would you what would you add to what i just said it does uh i'm my problem with their work is that there's no context they don't look at other um universities or colleges i spend a great deal of time in writing this book on reading about the history of education more generally and if you look at so using cadavers for medical experiments this was a notorious operation yeah throughout modern europe and throughout america and essentially it was always the poorest in society whose bodies were used so you know they might use homeless people uh and there was a notorious trade since very few people were willing to leave their bodies to medicine i'm not sure there was really any thing um there's a notorious trade in body snatching and body right great uh obtaining it's not just about slavery or that's right uh it is tensions within medicine and modern science but yes interesting okay you know i hate to end this conversation but we were out of time just as i was saying that we got a note here so it's been so wonderful to talk to you andre and i really so enjoyed reading your book and there's i have listed like three other things we can still talk about so there's a lot hopefully we'll continue that over coffee yes um i hope other people are willing you know like in buy and enjoy reading your book and thank you so much for coming today thank you thank you so much to the national archives for having our colleagues absolutely thank you um