Long before he entered the Presidency and became the well-revered symbol of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, the father of the Declaration of Independence, had a dream to reform education in the United States. Jefferson wanted to develop a new system of public education funded by the government and free from religious influence. Despite his numerous and varied efforts, Jefferson lacked support, and his ever-growing collection of critics and enemies helped to ensure that Jefferson’s dream did not become a reality until many years after his term as president had ended. Jefferson’s vision was “a bold experiment, a break from the centuries of educational tradition” (3). In 1818, his vision became a reality when Virginia legislature approved …show more content…
In 1841, the arrival of a new professor, Henry St. George Tucker, who became chairman of the board, “led to a reawakening of Jefferson’s belief that self-regulation, not rules, was all the discipline needed,” and a new system was set in motion in which students were required to hold each other accountable for their actions (131). In the years following, “enrollment at the University of Virginia equaled or exceeded enrollment at rivals Harvard and Yale,” and the school “expanded from its eight original departments to nineteen” (154). Although not everything was exactly how Jefferson had envisioned it would be, the return to student self-government, the expanded curriculum, the private supporters that began stepping forward to help fund the university, and the university’s overall growth and success would have greatly eased Jefferson’s mind, which “even as he lay dying, was consumed by the potential failure of his university” (50). Supported by the continued success of UVA even to this day, the spread of Jefferson’s ideas to the nation’s other public universities, and the fact that students are still taught according to the Jeffersonian method, Bowman and Santos effectively proved that although it was not easy, “the university had survived several riots, years of student stupidity and violence, the enmity of the religious establishment, the animosity of Jefferson’s political opponents, disease, bad publicity, and the vacillating governance of its own Board of Visitors” (151). Although it almost failed, eventually Jefferson’s school, “a radical experiment…. [laid] the groundwork for fundamental and dramatic changes in American higher education”