The last nails are officially in the coffin, and we’re heaving it over the guardrail. Good riddance! we agree, as the nasty old box bounces end over end down the steep embankment. 2013 was a shitty year. Over the course of 12 miserable months, we lost countless friends, jobs, and celebrities. Temperatures reached record highs, while Congress reached record lows. News both domestic and international was a creeping tragedy, and forests were pulped to publish horrible books. In a word: yechh. In a few more: adios! do svidaniya! don’t let the door hit you on the way out!

Despite the past year being generally terrible, however, several very good books were published. We reviewed a lot of them in the course of our forced march through the malaise of 2013, but, as is unavoidable, we missed some. So this week the editors are running short reviews of good to excellent books we didn’t cover last year. Some weren’t written about because they were released late in the year, when our schedules were clogged and our lives bending toward holiday hangovers. Others were (self-)assigned but, mysteriously, never materialized. At any rate, we’re happy to run them now, as offerings to you, dear reader, as talismans to carry forward into 2014 and beyond.

 

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get-img1384278601Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America by Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos [University of Virginia Press; 2013]

There is an exemplary tradition in telling the history of the American university – one which focuses on men of great vision like Thomas Jefferson at Virginia, Charles William Eliot and James Bryant Conant at Harvard, William Rainey Harper at the University of Chicago, or Clark Kerr at the University of California. Each is taken to have pushed higher education inexorably towards a more democratic, humane, and productive form that has made American universities the global standard-bearer. These histories are fine as far as they go, but there is another, far more entertaining way of telling this story — namely by noting how high minded ideals are brought low by hard realities. In Rot, Riot, and Rebellion Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos look past the legacy of Jefferson’s vision and document the rocky first decade of the University of Virginia.

Jefferson, a true son of the Enlightenment, expected a great deal from the university — a radical experiment in secular, civic education that earned him no shortage of enemies in the final years of his life. Among the many innovations that Virginia introduced were the system of electives (later placed at the center of Harvard’s undergraduate program by Charles William Eliot); an expanded curriculum including the study of both cutting edge science and classical culture; and the construction of the “Academical Village,” which placed the library, not the chapel, at the center of the campus and allowed for students and professors to live and work side by side in pursuit of knowledge and civic virtue. As an early student wrote, Jefferson at age 83 would make the “ride of eight or ten miles on horseback over a rough mountain-road” to watch over this “child of his old age,” to which he preferred “the more endearing title of Father to that of Founder.”

In constructing the Charlottsville campus, Jefferson envisioned a southern equivalent to the elite schools of the northeast. Here the future leaders of the South would benefit from the fruits of Enlightenment and learn how to embody the broadmindedness and virtue we associate with statesmen like Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams. What he got instead from the first generation of students was a concentration of licentiousness and criminality that would put modern fraternity culture to shame. It is hard to overstate the debauched, terroristic nature of the students. If you’ve seen Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, you might have a good idea of how the violence escalated (a very good idea in fact, as Bowman and Santos describe an event that mirrors the final scene of the film, in this case with an anonymous band of students threatening a professor through the night, pelting his home with rocks while his terrified family huddles upstairs).

The problem that UVA leaders faced was the culture of honor that reigned amongst these sons of the South, guaranteeing that crimes unfolded against a backdrop of impunity. Early in the book Bowen and Santos relate a story wherein two students chase down a professor (Harrison) and beat him with a horsewhip. “Horsewhipping itself was a violent though acceptable form of insult under the gentleman’s code of honor,” they write, “but whipping someone who was pinned down was far beyond the limits of gentlemanly conduct. The students freed Harrison from his attackers.” For a good while this is the closest thing that leaders would get to an effective system of justice.

Occasionally students would merit expulsion, but this was reserved only for the most grievous offenses. “We have had a great many fights up here lately — The faculty expelled Wickliffe last night for general bad conduct,” Edgar Allen Poe, aged 17 and enrolled at UVA at the time, wrote to his parents: “But more especially for biting one of the student’s arms whom he was fighting . . . after getting the other completely in his power, he began to bite — I saw the arm afterwards — and it was really a serious matter. It was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow.”

The drama that unfolded in the early years of Virginia was not Jefferson challenging the entrenched power of Protestants and Anglicans in higher education, but was rather in breaking the honor code to give administrators some leverage in disciplining students. These kinds of on-the-ground accounts are a helpful corrective and colorful supplement to histories of the university that stick closer to the plane of ideals and administrative directives. For anyone that has been on a college campus recently, they also give a little perspective on the “crisis of the university” claims that also tend to stick in those upper registers. Collecting a bunch of wealthy 17–21 year olds in one place is still a gamble we feel is worth pursuing for the good of the nation, and as dispiriting as a Thursday (!) night in Happy Valley or Baton Rouge may be, the early years of UVA should give us a little hope that cultural progress is possible.

— Michael Schapira, Interviews editor


 
 
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