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Chronicle of Higher Education
How Universities Used Enslaved People
By Marc Parry NOVEMBER 10, 2019 PREMIUM
George Long, a professor of Latin and Greek at the newly created
University of Virginia, was serving tea in his faculty quarters when
students lobbed a bottle filled with urine through the window.
The trouble soon got worse. The next night, October 1, 1825, at least 14
students put on masks and rioted on the central lawn. They shouted
xenophobic epithets at their mostly European professors. They abused an
enslaved person belonging to a faculty member, George Tucker. When
Tucker and a faculty colleague confronted them, students attacked the
professors with bottles, sticks, and a brick.
The unrest arose in response to a decree from the university’s founder,
Thomas Jefferson, that students didn’t need summer vacation. It
endangered the future of an institution that had already caused
controversy due to its lack of commitment to religion — no chapel, no
public prayers, no theology professors. When the riot broke out, critics
went "ballistic," says Alan Taylor, a history professor at Virginia, who
writes about the episode in a new book about the university’s early
history, Thomas Jefferson’s Education (W.W. Norton).
Adding to Jefferson’s woes: His relative, Wilson Miles Cary, a dissolute
young man whose education had been financed by the sale of enslaved
people, was the ringleader of the student riot.
"It shines a very bright but negative light on the university at a
critical moment in the first year of its existence," says Taylor, a
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who studies the early American republic.
Taylor has been shining his own harsh light at another key moment: the
university’s bicentennial. In those festivities, which ran from 2017 to
2019, UVa touted itself as heir to Jefferson’s belief in the
"illimitable freedom of the human mind." In his book, Taylor casts UVa’s
birth as a failed experiment in reshaping a society steeped in human
bondage. He holds up Cary’s riotous behavior as indicative of how hard
it would be to transform the scions of elite Virginia families into the
progressive reformers of Jefferson’s dreams.
The Chronicle spoke with Taylor about Jefferson’s vision for higher
education, the relationships between students and slaves on the campus,
and the reception Taylor has received for exposing UVa’s sordid history.
•
Q: You arrived at UVa in 2014. Why were you interested in studying its
history?
A: Partly it was that I was about to start a job then at UVa and the
university was approaching its bicentennial. I was involved in some of
the bicentennial preparations, and so it became clear to me that I
needed to know more about the origins of the university if I was going
to speak publicly about that. And then also we just live in times where
public funding for education is controversial, and in general has been
curtailed compared to past levels. And I wanted to understand the
historical backdrop behind public engagement with education and why it
might be receding now.
Q: What did Jefferson hope to achieve by creating the university?
A: Jefferson was a brilliant man capable of great insights but also a
man who was very sensitive to criticism. And so he wanted to transform
Virginia, but he didn’t really want to confront directly powerful men
within Virginia who were committed to slavery and committed to limiting
the political participation of poorer whites. And so his way to resolve
his own contradiction was to create an institution that he expected
would train the next generation of leaders in Virginia and would give
them a broader, more cosmopolitan perspective, which he believed would
lead them to want to make the kinds of reforms that Jefferson longed to
make but had failed to make in his own lifetime. In particular, he’s
hoping that they will democratize Virginia — increase political
participation and access on the part of poorer whites. He also hopes
that they will adopt a program of gradually emancipating Virginia’s
slaves but also to then deport all the freed people to Africa. The book
is about why it is that these young men and this institution disappoint
Jefferson’s hopes.
Q: And why is that?
A: Well, it turns out Jefferson has an exaggerated confidence in the
power of institutions and rules and architecture to reshape human nature
and to reshape society. The young men who are raised in these privileged
families are not going to be reshaped by this institution in ways that
will lead them to criticize and reform a way of life that has been to
the benefit of their families.
Long after Jefferson’s death, the university remains quite a troubled
place. And it never fulfills Jefferson’s aspirations for reforming
Virginia. Instead, the University of Virginia will become a bastion of
conservatism that wants to preserve the Virginia way of life against any
kind of pressure from the outside world, particularly Northern states,
until the 20th century.
Q: You characterize UVa as "an especially complex and crowded
plantation." Could you describe how the relationships between students
and slaves unfolded in this environment?
A: There are approximately 100 enslaved people living in and around the
grounds of the university, who are essential to its operations. They do
not belong to the university. They belong in some cases to faculty
members. In more cases they belong to people called the hotel keepers,
who are providing the meals and room cleaning and other services for the
students. The young men assume that any black person is subject to their
commands. They believe that their standing as a white man in their
society depends upon always asserting their honor by dishonoring
enslaved people who show any form of resistance.
Q: Can you give me an example?
A: One of them is where the young men decide that a 16-year-old girl
that they’ve had sexual relations with, who is enslaved and belongs to
an entrepreneur who lives on the margins of the university, that she has
given them a venereal disease. So they feel entitled to go and beat her
up. And then the owner complains that his property has been damaged. So
the faculty get involved. And meanwhile the young men have decided to
try to head off trouble by going and giving the owner some money. The
faculty announce that they’re basically content with this resolution.
And there is no compensation that’s provided to the abused young woman.
Q: Did researching this book make you see the institution in a different
light?
A: Sure. You can look at this beautiful architecture, and you can see it
aesthetically. Or you can also look at it and think about it socially.
What was it designed to do originally? There are buildings called
pavilions, which faculty lived in. There were the dorm rooms, which were
in between them. And then behind them was a second row, which had what
were called the hotels and other dorm rooms. And in between were various
gardens, which are quite lovely today but which in the past were kind of
workshop areas which would have shanties where enslaved people would
live. Or in the basements of these pavilions, enslaved people would live
in very dank conditions.
I’m not singling out the University of Virginia to say this is a
uniquely evil institution. Slavery affected every aspect of life in the
early republic. We make a mistake if we think of universities in the
early republic as some sort of ivory towers that are abstracted from
society. The troubles that UVa had you can also find at the College of
William & Mary, the University of North Carolina, the University of
Georgia, University of South Carolina, Princeton.
Q: That said, your account of UVa’s early years as this "den of
dissipation," as you refer to it, might be the most unflattering
portrait of campus life I have ever seen. Do people there hate that
you’re emphasizing this history?
A: The university has done a very good job, through its own commission,
to investigate its past. They’ve been encouraging because they want a
full accounting of the history. They’re building a monument right now to
the enslaved workers there. So I’ve gotten nothing but positives from
the administration, from students, from faculty members. And all of my
direct engagement with alumni has been positive. But I wrote a piece
about Jefferson and slavery in the alumni magazine, and certainly if you
read the online comments, there is some pushback from people who would
like to have the older story told about the university, and not this
newer one that includes slavery.
Q: You mentioned the memorial. UVa also named a dorm in honor of
enslaved laborers who worked on the campus. And they’ve begun searching
for the descendants of those enslaved people. Is that enough? How should
Virginia and other colleges with similar histories respond to those
connections to slavery now?
A: Recovering the past and creating a public presence for that past in
the form of a monument — while that’s necessary, it’s not sufficient.
What’s sufficient would be something that would help African Americans
in general to feel that the University of Virginia is theirs as well as
it is anybody else’s who is a citizen of Virginia, and not to feel that
it is alien territory. I don’t believe we’ve reached that point.
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