Jefferson And Madison and the University of Virginia

Jefferson wrote his own epitaph, and the choice still startles: “Father of the University of Virginia” makes the cut, while “President of the United States” does not. That single detail opens a window into how seriously Jefferson took education, not as résumé polish, but as the infrastructure of self-government. We follow the long road from early dreams of a national university to the state-level strategy that finally produces UVA in Charlottesville, with Jefferson politicking, drafting plans, and obsessing over everything from faculty slots to building materials.

Along the way, we spotlight James Madison’s role as the indispensable partner. Madison helps shepherd key ideas through the realities of legislatures, public opinion, and constitutional limits, often serving as Jefferson’s pragmatic sounding board. The result is a founding vision that looks more like a broad liberal arts curriculum than a modern research university, built to train “statesmen, legislators, and judges” and to cultivate a shared baseline of constitutional principles before partisan fights begin.

We also dig into one of the most consequential design choices: Jefferson’s insistence on a secular public university. No divinity professorship, no official religious dominance, and a theory of church-state separation shaped by Virginia’s disestablishment battles and Madison’s arguments about protecting religion from government power. If you care about civic education, constitutional culture, or the roots of American higher education, this conversation ties the architectural details to the political philosophy underneath.

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Transcript

Jefferson’s Tombstone And The Hook

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. I'm really looking forward to this one because we're talking about Jefferson, Madison, and the University of Virginia. A, I have been to Monticello and Montpelier multiple times. They're two of my very favorite places. I love Charlottesville. UVA is an incredibly beautiful campus. Greatest campus I've ever been to. Genuinely. And I always thought it was so interesting, you know, going to Monticello and learning about Thomas Jefferson, but that his gravestone says that he is the founder of the University of Virginia. And it does not say that he was president of the United States. And I always just found that such a fascinating thing. So Dr. Vienberg is with us today. Dr. Vienberg, how do Jefferson and Madison kind of go? Because they lived, I say, close to each other in like today's terms, it's close because it's not super far. But how does this establish the University of Virginia?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, and I'm glad you started with uh the inscription, because that's actually what I would preempted what I was going to do too, which is Jefferson requests his own. He right, we have like literally a drawing he does of his tombstone, of what he wants his tombstone and what he wants scrawled on it. So he wants that he's the author of the Declaration of Independence, which probably overstates it a little bit as we've talked about. He's the draftsman, but other anyway, he wants credit for the statute disestablishing the Anglican Church in Virginia, so the religious freedom statute, which will come back about Virginia, the university, that's important. And then the father of the University of Virginia. And the latter two efforts were things that he tried to get for a long, long time. He spent about seven, he spent seven or eight years during basically the American Revolution and after trying to disestablish the Anglican Church. And he spent decades actually trying to get something like a university, whether that was, you know, at one point debating whether to do that as the national university in DC. And in both of those, uh, as you said, Jefferson's sort of that visionary, but he has Madison to help. Madison is the bill sponsor that gets the Virginia disestablishment thing through that Jefferson had drafted years before. And Madison will take over for Jefferson after Jefferson dies. So a little bit of backstory before this, we've alluded to it a couple times, but in the Roger Sherman podcast. But there had been an effort. Do we want to have a basically national university that would be a place where America's civic

From National University To Virginia Plan

SPEAKER_01 3:26

leaders would be so sort of centrally educated? And we have Jefferson, and you know, the idea would be that they would have sort of non-partisan but like orthodox texts. So they would have the Federalists, they'd have the Constitution, but then they would have like maybe great speeches and texts from the Federalist and Jeffersonians. So the idea was they're trying to basically create that. And it falls apart partly Roger Sherman's doing and others who say, like, this is clearly not authorized by the Constitution. You could maybe run an elementary school for Washington, D.C. That seems fine. But something that is designed to be influencing the whole nation is really a federal, is really a, you know, if it's education like that, that's really beyond what's an enumerated power. So they turn toward toward thinking about this at the state level. Uh Jefferson starts working on what's called uh Central College. He has Madison and current president Monroe actually detours over to go help in the groundbreaking. And Jefferson convinces the Virginia legislature, uh, and so this is in like 1815, 1880, you know, this is later on, convinces 1815, 1818, it sort of fits and starts. He convinces the Virginia legislature, which wants a university, to convert his little small private college into that. Jefferson can play politics. He's packed the commission with basically all of his allies, and he's gonna be on it that's gonna pick this. And he's also written the report that basically what they're gonna do. So they pretty much meet, and Jefferson's like, all right, gang, here's what's in the report. We're good, right? Yep. And he has he's done some pretty funny stuff where he said, well, it should be in Charlottesville because people are healthy there. And he's like collected this weird document that has how many people are like 80 years old. They're in Charlottesville and shows you can live because it's healthy. He's doing this we all this weird lobbying. He's got these maps drawn up, but he's like really, and he has a legislative ally, uh Joseph Cavill. The Cavill family is really prominent in Virginia-Maryland politics for a long time. The legislature basically approves what this commission had proposed, and Jefferson takes point as the rector, is the title. And Madison is in many things as his ally and sounding board until Jefferson dies in 1826, obviously, Declaration of Independence, you know, July 4th. And Madison succeeds him until Madison himself dies. And it is quite striking how deeply invested in the details Jefferson is. This is not just like some sort of you know, bored old guy who's sitting on a board, just so like people will come and pay him some money. Like he's micromanaging the curriculum, he's planning stuff out, he's like personally designing the so-called academic village, which you may remember from visiting Charlottesville, is like the rotunda, plus those like that two rows of classes of rooms. He's even writing letters on how they can beat tariffs so that they can get some of the materials shipped in and counted as educational materials instead of construction materials, because there's a different tariff rate. There's a historian, Andrew O'Shaughnessy, who writes a whole book about this stuff. So if you get you can get into the details, but he writes out what the objectives of this are. He writes this, he he's explaining what he thinks primary education is supposed to do, which is like wildly ambitious today. But what he wants the university to do is he says, to quote, form the statesmen, legislators, and judges on who public prosperity and individual happiness are to depend, to expound the principles and structure of government, laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, basically leaving us free to do what doesn't violate the equal rights of another. So if you and he he has a list literally of what the 10 professors are that he wants to hire. And this is this is amazing to me if you compare what his vision of the university looks like to like the modern hyper-specialized research university, right? So like I'm not even a scholar of American constitutionalism, right? I'm supposed to be a scholar of state constitutionalism and federalism with this period, right? Uh but that like there's a professor who's basically assigned to do like all the modern languages. And there's another professor that's supposed to do like all the classical languages, and there's supposed to be like one government professor, three or four science professors, science and math. So as he says,

Politics, Lobbying, And Charlottesville’s Win

SPEAKER_01 7:41

yeah, we we want to, he says, among the benefits of education, the advantage of training up counselors to administer the affairs of country and all its departments, and to bear the share in the councils of our national government. So he has this idea that UVA will be also training Southern lead, particularly Southern leaders in civics. And one of the things that's really important to Jefferson is he wants to make sure it is a secular school. Uh, this is why I said the second part of the tombstone would come back. Jefferson, when he's governor of Virginia, basically breaks the connection between the Episcopalian slash Anglican church and William and Mary, where he had gone to school himself. So he basically secularizes that school. And he looks around and he sees what are the three big colleges in the United States? It's Princeton, which is Presbyterians in New Jersey, Yale and Harvard, which are congregationalists in New England. And so he doesn't want either Presbyterians or Congregationalists to take over and build it like they're doing everything else. And he doesn't want the Anglicans. So he very much secularizes it. And in fact, again, he got William and Mary to basically fire or not renew its divinity professors. And so he says that this university in Virginia will not have any religion professors. As he says, in conformity with the principles of the Constitution, which places all sects of religion on an equal footing, we have proposed no professor of divinity. And the rather is the proofs of the being of a God, creator, preserver, and universe basically says it's the ethics person and the morals people, but we're not going to have a divinity professor. They'll learn, you know, the Bible with the Greek and the Hebrew professor, but with a basis formed common to all sects. And he fights off that he doesn't even want a chapel. He grudgingly, in the original proposal, says that they can do some religious worship in the big rotunda, but then he fights that too after that. After that happens. So obviously the UVA, in some sense, succeeds, right? In some ways, it's ends up being more like a regular university than his very, very like real. I mean, all the schools are basically much closer to liberal arts colleges than big research universities today. But he originally wanted this almost, I don't know, like not even a real present, like not a hierarchical president. Like basically the professors and the students, more or less just like hanging out as little, you know, not equals, but basically hanging around a dinner table, kind of having education, educational conversations. There's some accounts of when he goes and visits and he gets pissed that there's like drinking and like partying happening because he had thought that if they build this correctly and isolate it correctly, it'll be like monks that are just excited to sit and talk about, you know, Locke and Plato and whatnot. And so, yeah, we have well, we have the curriculum that he and Madison were pitching. It's it's honestly very much like our curriculum in Skettle, the civic school at ASU. You know, he wants classics in there, he wants the Federalists. They want to have, and I think this is really interesting. But they think that we can create an orthodoxy of politics, that we can find sort of common, common level constitutional principles that we all agree on, and then we can fight about the partisanship ahead of time, which is a nice aspiration, I think. But as I think about what that would look like today, that's somewhat challenging. But in some sense, that's what we try to do, which is like, hey, we can all at least agree on the constitution. Now we can fight about what the tax rates or environmental policy or whatever should look like within that framework. But so that they're aspiring to do that. But they very much view the core of this thing as civic education. Like they really think that that's the core of what this is supposed to do is generate generate people who are well versed in and have the attitudes and the constitutional knowledge to be, as I said, you know, good leaders of the legislature, executive, judiciary, foreign server, you know, uh both the state and the feds. So yeah. So Jefferson's obviously the main pusher of this, but Madison is,

Designing UVA And Training Civic Leaders

SPEAKER_01 11:41

as with many things, the sort of prudent sounding board on the back end saying, that part's crazy, Tom. Don't do that. This part works well, which is sort of what their interactions always have been, as we've talked about before.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

I now anytime I think about James Madison, I'm gonna think about him saying that. Like, that's crazy, Tom. No. It is so interesting, like Charlottesville as a whole, because you mentioned James Monroe. That's another presidential house I've been to, the Highland. And and being at UVA, for me, it just had, I don't want to say a different feel, but it did. And it's interesting that the school that we work for, the civic school at ASU, I mean, it feels modeled after that. And I do want to say I was at UVA in 2019, the day that the basketball team won the national championship. And never in my life have I been surrounded by so much joy at a university to be like in that. But UVA now, I mean, clearly still exists, is still very successful. And you talked about the schools that existed at the time, and they're they're all private schools, right? And UVA is a public university.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Well, and then you know, there's also Columbia. I mean, they we talked about this when we looked at the Massachusetts one, right? Harvard was private, but it was also understood as Massachusetts as kind of state government thing, right? So again, particularly New England has a very different understanding of separation of church and state than does Virginia after Jefferson and Madison, right? Because, you know, Jefferson and Madison, when they're trying to disestablish the Anglican church, because Patrick Henry wants to basically copy New England and say, let's have a multiple establishment, right? You can basically pick your church, you have to support a church, but you can't just like free ride off morality or whatever is Henry's pitch. And so his argument is like, look, we're not pro-Anglican. Like we're not, we he wants to disestablish it in that sense, but have multiple establishments. And Marshall, I think George Washington is on, is on the camp on that. But you know, this is where I think we've talked about Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, which is probably the best sort of X, the it's the best argument for a stricter separation of church and state, is this sort of map memo that Madison writes to defend what Jefferson is trying to do, where he basically says, like, religion, you know, the narrative is less we need to protect the state from the church, and more that we need to protect the church from the state, which is an argument that then we'll pick up that New Englanders will pick up themselves as well. You know, and there's there's some there's some kind, so there's some kind of fuzziness. Dartmouth is originally the same kind of thing. It's now a private school, but it's sort of chartered as this is like you know, the famous Dartmouth College versus Woodward case in the 1820s is basically New Hampshire trying to formalize, more or less turn it into the University of New Hampshire, which it's de facto been. And you know, the Supreme Court in that case says, no, it's a private thing. You can't just like hijack it with gubernatorial appointees. You know, Rutgers sort of switches back and forth in in some ways. So the the line between them is a little different between you know and and William and Mary, right? Is like originally basically a you know, is it public or is it private? So there's this sort of interesting division that's drawn in this era of we no longer can have public religious institutions. So you sort of take the public part out first, and then in many of them, then you know, Harvard and Yale are you know, Harvard isn't Baylor

Secular School And Church State Separation

SPEAKER_01 15:26

today, right? Um Princeton isn't, you know, I I don't even know what other, you know, print Princeton's not, you know, a hundred years ago, Princeton was like the place for Presbyterian, like it was like the centerpiece, and it was the centerpiece of Presbyterian theology as well. And no, you know, nobody thinks of that at this at this point today. So yeah, UVA is is is different in that sense. And it's sort of in that sense, I think you're what what you're getting at is it points to a model of a different kind of unit, of a different kind of college in that one, which I would, you know, arguably Harvard, et cetera, end up drifting more toward looking like UVA than UVA looks like, you know, than UVA looks like Harvard, uh, for example.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

So how does the kind of mission and vision of UVA and its founding exemplify what Thomas Jefferson believed education to be?

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Yeah, so Jefferson very much has this view. You know, this is one of the places where Jefferson and Madison are different. They both have, for example, a constitutional view, at least Jefferson, you know, is Madison switching for, you know, we'll say post-1790, Madison is clearly, is clearly very skeptical of central federal power. So he agrees with Jefferson on that. But Madison and Jefferson have very different views of human nature. This is one of the places where you know we've talked about, you know, like what are Madison's religious views? Some point to him being like basically closer to Tom Paine. Others think he's like Washington, whatever. I think few would put him in the evangelical camp. But he is trained by them at Princeton. He's trained, and he very much keeps, like Roger Sherman, the attitude of deep sense of like original sin and human frailty and human error. So that's part so Madison is much more pessimistic about people will do bad things, groups of people will do bad things together. And so, whereas Jefferson has a much more sort of enlightenment view about human nature is good, human nature can be directed much more easily toward positive things, and particularly education is the tool that does that, right? So, you know, Jefferson has these convoluted systems too, where he wants this like ward republic where like the local government educates this and educates sort of moving you up the moving you up the tiers. So Jefferson very much views this, and again, it's supposed to be a small little school, right? I mean, the idea which and so it's not and so this is one place where it's different in a sense. You know, their expectation, their expectation is that this is going to be training a relatively small number, but they won't necessarily be the elites that are like, well, I'm from the famous family, right? So it's training a sort of meritocratic, you know, and Jefferson calls it like a natural aristocracy in various places, of people who are talented and hardworking and whatnot. So, you know, it has that goal of it. But yeah, this is one of the places where there's a little bit of daylight between Madison and Jefferson. That Jefferson thinks that it is basically education is the tool to solve, I'm not gonna say all social problems, but whereas Madison tends to have a much more of a pessimistic view that much more of a pessimistic view. So he keeps

Public Versus Private Colleges Then And Now

SPEAKER_01 18:41

that piece to the extent that Madison moves away from his like Christian upbringing, which again uh Madison's pretty cagey on that, but he does keep that deep pessimism about human nature. But Jefferson is Jefferson's just you know, too too smitten with human possibility, which is partly why I keep joking about you know their their interactions are often like Jefferson having this great idea and Madison saying, like Tom, like that's like cool cool off on that one. He's they're just their temperaments are different, right? Like watching the two of them interact is one of those things that would just be like amazing to be able to go back and look at because they're so different. They're so different, they're so completely different. You know, Jefferson, they're both scholarly, but like Jefferson so Jefferson's very well read. Like Madison is a nerd, like he just wants to sit and read, you know, just sit and read stuff. So they're they're just very different. But the UVA, certainly at the founding, has you know early on this very heavy emphasis on civic education, which is true for most of and that's something that other places pick up. I mean, requirements of like civic education, like civics, government, whatever, was a basically a college-required class in almost all the country until 50 years ago, basically. You know, the different schools tapers off at different times. So that definitely is definitely something where it the universe looks less like what those guys wanted.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

But that's what we're trying to do. I was gonna say it's interesting because it almost feels like that's what we're doing, not only with our center, uh, but like you said, with the civic school and with this podcast. And what's interesting is that this podcast will be the last one of the 250. We have one more talking about what the declaration means 250 years later, but it does feel really fitting to kind of end this long series with Madison and Jefferson. So, Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much.