Un-Jeffersonian

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Un-Jeffersonian				September 24, 2008

You have to be dutifully circumspect when you revert to using Thomas Jefferson as a source for things educational. His vision was skewed by a colonial set of values that seem quite preposterous in the 21^st century.

While he engendered in his proposals for public education the same levels of learning we now have – elementary school, high school and college – he believed that most males would learn all they needed to know about making a living in elementary school. A rigorous curriculum saturated with reading, writing and arithmetic would probably do it for most students.

Potentially outstanding students could proceed to high school, but only the exceedingly bright would attend college. There they would involve themselves in the rigors of Latin, Greek and classical philosophy to the point of eventually running the country.

There was always in Jefferson’s mind a link between higher education and government service, and in this he was not far removed from the Platonic telos of leadership buttressed by epistemological excellence.

Blacks, who Jefferson thought needed care more than education, and women, who should devote themselves to domesticity, were not part of his educational equation.

On the other hand, he never saw constitutionally-driven government or education as static entities. The fact that he thought that the Constitution should be rewritten or excised every 19 years is indicative of his penchant for genuine rebellion.

In a letter to Abigail Adams in 1787, Jefferson wrote that “Rebellion will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

Given his ties to William & Mary and his disdain for foreign entanglements, I suspect that Jefferson would have approved of the student sit-ins and demonstrations at the college during the philosophical and political upheavals associated with the war in Vietnam.

I suspect also that he would have approved of the attempts by former president Gene Nichol to bring vibrancy and change to a campus that had been slumbering its way through all too many years of dull serenity. As a result of his unwavering opposition to any linkage between church and state, Jefferson undoubtedly would have supported Nichol’s attempt to remove the Wren cross.

Unfortunately, William & Mary, whether because of its tradition-bound Southern associations or its culturally limited geographic location, has rarely become complicit in the rebellious educational transformations that have come to be associated with more progressive urban institutions.

It was a foregone conclusion, therefore, that what passed for the Nichol rebellion would agitate conservative types among the alumni and the state legislature. This, predictably, led an incredulously wimpish Board of Visitors to deliver itself of dubious governance excuses to terminate Nichol’s contract.

Unlike Jefferson, the board has no interest in a little rebellion now and then. God forbid that there should be any storm in the atmosphere that would put it in the position of having to support a president who induced controversy in his attempts to drag the college out of its soporific cultural somnolence.

In an obvious attempt to divert any further campus storms elsewhere, the Board of Visitors reflected upon its own inbred gene pool and appointed Taylor Reveley, former dean of the law school, as interim president.

In a letter to the college community earlier this month, Rector Michael Powell informed recipients that, though the board had initially agreed to an immediate search for a new president, “It was clear that our community was not yet ready to proceed and that serious challenges suggested an immediate search would be unproductive.”

In short, by firing Nichol under suspicious circumstances the board had put itself and the college in such an untenable position relative to attracting candidates that it had virtually no alternative but to now offer Reveley a three-year contract as president.

Exhibiting an odd lapse of memory, Powell in the same letter rather bizarrely attributes to Reveley Nicol’s successes relative to the diversity of the class of 2012 and the college’s improved standing in the U.S. News and World Report college listings.

There is little doubt that the college is facing tough economic times and that budgetary concerns must be dealt with in an expeditious manner. And certainly Reveley has calmed the uproar that ensued after Nichol’s resignation. Yet, William & Mary is no different from other institutions facing similar budgetary problems.

What is troubling is that the alacrity with which the Reveley appointment has been made, coupled with the board’s refusal to conduct a search, leads inevitably to the conclusion that the easy road out has been traveled and that the board has assured itself that rejection on the basis of a lack of potential presidential independence is no longer a factor.

I’m not at all sure that Jefferson, the advocate of rebellion, would approve.