I’m a sucker for academic pomp, which probably comes from too many movies and not much pomp at my alma mater. It’s a little bit hard to imagine the future Dr. D. headed for work on the pig crew while wearing an academic gown. Not a black one anyway. So you might imagine that I find plenty to love about a tradition-bound place like the University of Virginia. (Which, by tradition, is called “The University” by University community members.) Rooms on the lawn, morning coats at graduation, and secret societies all seem pretty nifty to me. Describing the importance of one of the country’s most prestigious homes of higher education in terms of these peculiarities, however, makes about as much sense as characterizing the Southern United States in terms of a cold beverage.
Virginia is much more than tea, and it’s university is much more than a rotunda. It is about an enterprise which does not immediately appear to be very enterprising. The business of a school is not business. A school exists to ask why we would pursue a business enterprise in the first place. Are we seeking to lift ourselves and our families from one economic stratum to the next? Are we working to help our place, our community, and the people around us? Do we see fundamental flaws or injustices in the world that we hope to make right? Is one of these aims better than the others? You could easily spend four years trying to suss this out.
It would be a shame if someone made you drop all that for a bit of vocational training. Of course, that’s not exactly what the Rectors of the University of Virginia were trying to do with their President. But they were trying to make the University more “results oriented” kind of like a business. That goodness the faculty, staff, and students rejected this vision of the Rectors. Their education is not just an outcome, it is a process. The ends of that process are not only the skills of thought that bring innovations to the world, they are skills of moral discernment which help determine how those innovations can improve the world. That’s something of which, I am sure, Mr. Jefferson would approve.