The report from UVA’s President’s Commission on Slavery and the University has been released.



http://vpdiversity.virginia.edu/sites/vpdiversity.virginia.edu/files/PCSU%20Report%20FINAL_July%202018.pdf



For me (and I was on an advisory board to the Commission), a surprise was Jefferson’s apparent desire to inculcate UVA students with pro-slavery thinking, a dramatic turn from what decades earlier he’d praised at W&M, its teaching skepticism about slavery and his hopes its students could, when in power, do something about it.



The report says



Even in Jefferson’s own imagining of what the University of Virginia could be, he understood it to be an institution with slavery at its core. He believed that a southern institution was necessary to protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North. Jefferson wrote his friend James Breckenridge in 1821, expressing his concern with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a place “against us in position and principle.” He worried that in northern institutions, young Virginians might imbibe “opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country. This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.”



In other words, Jefferson believed it was important to educate Virginians, and other southerners, in an institution that understood and ultimately supported slavery. In fact, Jefferson’s own world was one that was so intimately connected with slavery that he likely could not imagine a different reality.



Full text of the letter is at



http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-1839



The report adduces further evidence along these lines—I thought I’d passed along a salient fact not in the report, that long after Jefferson had died, UVA, in 1845, sought to headhunt W&M's special shame, Thomas Roderick Dew.



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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia  23187



                                http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/



                                http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html

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