Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson's Struggle to Save the University That Changed America

6. Scholars amid Scoffaws

6 Scholars amid Sco±aws Professors, who had anticipated that most of their work would take place within the confines of a classroom, were now forced to capture miscreants, judge their guilt, and mete out punishment. With students refusing to form a court to punish each other, the task of school discipline fell to the professors and, more particularly, to Faculty Chairman George Tucker. The task required steely determination—or, as Cabell once grumbled, steel of another sort: “I am particularly anxious to be informed on the best mode of governing a large mass of students without the use of the bayonet.”1 The professors numbered eight in 1826, the school’s second year. They were a motley collection of eccentric and brilliant personalities. To understand them is to understand how the school and students were shaped in these crucial years. These were the men Je≠erson had chosen to guide the school to preeminence. One of the two Americans on the faculty at the university’s inception was John Patton Emmet, not yet twenty-nine years old when the school opened its doors to students. He was best known to students for the menagerie of wild animals he kept in his pavilion. Born in Ireland on April 8, 1796, Emmet was the son of Thomas Emmet, a ringleader in the Irish rebellion of 1798 who was sent to prison in Scotland. After his father’s release, John Emmet moved with his family to New York in 1804. Emmet attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he also became assistant professor of mathematics until his health weakened in 1817. Scholars amid Sco±aws 55 After spending a year in Naples, Italy, recovering, Emmet returned to America and in 1822 earned a medical degree from the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons. He practiced in Charleston, South Carolina, where he delivered a series of lectures on chemistry that became so popular he caught the attention of the University of Virginia founders. He arrived in Charlottesville to assume the post of chemistry professor as a perfect bachelor and populated his house with snakes, a white owl, and a tame bear that freely roamed the house and garden. But after he married Professor George Tucker’s niece, Mary Byrd Tucker of Bermuda, the snakes were banished, the owl set free, and the bear put on a dinner plate. A grand experimenter, Emmet ran tests on everything from raising silkworms to curing hams. Cornelia Randolph, Je≠erson’s granddaughter, seemed fascinated with him when she wrote, in her folksy, precise manner, to her sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge: “Dr. Emmet is an irishman complete, warm in his likings & dislikes; fiery, & so impetuous even in lecturing that his students complain his words are too rapid for their apprehension; they cannot follow him quick enough; to which he answers, they must catch his instruction as it goes, he cannot wait for any man’s understanding, in conversation his words tumble out heels over head so that he is continually making bulls & blunders and to crown all has much of the brogue when he becomes animated.”2 Tucker, the other American and known to his colleagues as a most wretched novelist, was a native of Bermuda and a member of the U.S. Congress when Je≠erson tapped him to be his professor of moral philosophy . He was the first to feel the burden of the former president’s lax attitude toward discipline. With his other innovations in higher education , Je≠erson had made no room for a president at his university, instead setting up a system in which members of the faculty would each year elect from among themselves a chairman who would serve as chief administrator of all school business outside the classroom. Je≠erson thought a president would be a barrier to intimacy among students and professors. And, of course, presidents of other universities were typically religious leaders, and Je≠erson saw no advantage in putting a churchman in charge of his secular school. The chairman was to serve a term of one year before passing the title on to the next professor. On April 12, 56 Rot, Riot, and Rebellion 1825, the professors held their first faculty meeting and, in Tucker’s absence , elected him chairman. They felt that, as an American, he might have a better understanding of the students. Also, Tucker was fifty years old, by far...