Saturday, July 20, 2013

Thomas Jefferson Wasn't THAT Smart

I am reading a biography on Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe attended the University of Virginia in 1826. The university is described in the biography as: "the fulfillment of forty years' thought and planning by its eighty three year old rector, Thomas Jefferson."

Jefferson felt that Virginia youth would not respond well to the tight discipline of Harvard and other northern schools so "he established a system of minimum rules and maximum governance, hoping students would monitor one another's behavior for the good of all."

Dig the results:

"During a riot in the school's first year, masked undergraduates threw bricks and bottles at professors"

"The faculty threatened to resign unless the school established "an efficient Police."

"During Edgar's year, seven students were suspended or expelled for high stakes gambling, assaults, or drunkenness, and his examination in French had to be re-scheduled after "some or all" of the class managed to steal the questions beforehand."

"Several scholars besieged the house of a townsman and stripped the clothes off his servant-woman believing she "had infected the Students with disease."

Apparently forty years wasn't enough for Jefferson to come up with a better plan. Perhaps he was distracted while cavorting with his slave women.

Thomas Jefferson: One of the founding fathers of this great country; the founding father of the first Animal House.

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