The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University by Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy (review)

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson reminded John Adams that "our parties took different sides" on the question of "the improvability of the human mind." According to Jefferson, Adams stood with "the enemies of reform." These men believed the "principles practices & institutions of our fathers" were "the consummation of wisdom," and therefore revered the "systems of education received from their ancestors." By contrast, Jefferson and his allies maintained that there was no limit to progress in science and learning. They supported the "reformation of institutions" to encourage that progress.¹ Jefferson's belief in the "illimitable freedom of the human mind" provides the title for Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy's comprehensive account of Jefferson's ideas about higher education and their institutionalization in the University of Virginia (UVA). O'Shaughnessy brilliantly recaptures both the revolutionary potential of Jefferson's educational ideas and UVA's importance to the history of higher education without losing sight of how slavery shaped the man and university.

O'Shaughnessy begins by outlining Jefferson's motivations to found UVA. Jefferson was influenced by his own college experience, attempts to build intellectual community at home, and Enlightenment values. But O'Shaughnessy identifies the main "catalyst" as the American Revolution (36). Jefferson knew that the republic's viability was in the hands of future generations. The United States needed to educate virtuous citizens and meritorious leaders. The rest of the world offered no usable model. Public schools were strongest in monarchies like Prussia, where they trained well-to-do children to be obedient bureaucrats for autocratic states. That the republic needed new and different forms of education was among the most hackneyed ideas of the period. Why, then, did Jefferson still feel the need to reinvent U.S. higher education, nearly 50 years after independence?

Jefferson's letter to Adams gestures to O'Shaughnessy's answer. Jefferson thought that higher education in the nation was compromised. Theocratic Federalists, and their allies among Congregational and Presbyterian ministers, controlled most colleges and blocked schools that inculcated republican values. Virginia's existing colleges, namely William and Mary, were beyond repair. A new university was politically necessary. O'Shaughnessy perceptively notes that Jefferson first proposed the idea for UVA during the election of 1800. Here, O'Shaughnessy makes a contentious historiographical point: The desire to protect slavery and to shield southern boys from abolitionist northerners did not drive Jefferson's original plans for UVA. Many northern university leaders were not antislavery anyway, O'Shaughnessy avers. Rather, the specter of religious and anti-republican Federalist indoctrination motivated Jefferson. It was only after the Missouri Crisis that he sometimes leveraged the specter of northern antislavery to advocate for UVA.

Founding and building UVA was a challenging task that revealed Jefferson's substantial political skills. Using Jefferson's correspondence with allies and newly available drafts of the Rockfish Gap Commission Report—which recommended the creation of UVA—O'Shaughnessy reconstructs how Jefferson balanced regional and partisan interests and headed off attempts to turn an existing school into the new state university. After siting the new university in Charlottesville, Jefferson induced the cash-strapped state legislature to fund "one of the largest public works projects undertaken in North America" while the Panic of 1819 still raged (125). Finally, Jefferson instituted his desired, controversial curriculum at UVA. He wanted a talented and well-compensated faculty to staff his republican university, and then recruited most professors from Europe. Jefferson advocated a law curriculum to counteract Blackstone's "Tory version of British law" that suffused most other legal curricula (153). Most importantly, he excluded theology from the curriculum in the middle of the Second Great Awakening. According to O'Shaughnessy, historians of higher education have not fully grasped the originality of Jefferson's plan because much of it eventually became standard or is...