Introduction

Tradition at the Universtiy of Virginia

Tradition is a term used frequently at UVa, but like an organic part of any institution, its meaning is accordingly elusive. More than just the institutional inertia radicals would claim in the Sixties, there existed (and exists) a submerged duality of tradition at UVa used to justify both progress and restraint. At the beginning of the 1960s UVa clung to its image as a bastion for southern gentlemen, but commitments to individualism, free speech, and educational excellence would increasingly call into question the deep-seated customs of southern gentlemanly behavior. The concept of the University as “Jeffersonian,” often seen as the distinguishing characteristic of academic and social life at the University and the touchstone of its many traditions, was as ambiguous and contradictory as the man himself.

In 1959, when Edgar Shannon was inaugurated as president of the University, southern gentlemen enjoyed a rich heritage at UVa, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Gentlemen were refined, reserved, and too urbane to be worked into a passion about anything. Their social structure revolved around the slippery concept of honor, relying on rigid measures of formalized respect and behavior to establish an individual’s status within the larger community. If you had to contemplate how to go about being a gentleman, then you probably were not one. The dogma “don’t stick your neck out” applied to everything from the ubiquitous “coat and tie” to academics and politics. Historically, they were the elite of their society and they stuck together—a web of fraternities, athletic events, bourbon and honor bound them to their perch at the peak of white Southern manhood. They identified the University with these values and saw University traditions as the embodiment of southern virtues. As such, these traditions helped to blend their collective identity as students and southern white men and formed a key part of their definition of Mr. Jefferson’s University.

Southern social customs created the public face of the University. However, the University also had an alternative institutional legacy. Jefferson’s original plan was far from conservative. It proposed such ideas as an elective rather than mandated curriculum, an emphasis on scientific inquiry rather than theology, and a secular rather than religious academic foundation. Jefferson also bequeathed a legacy of classical liberalism and freedom, classifying the founding of the University on his tombstone with the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the Declaration of Independence. The history of the institution implied innovation and radical change, not the debonair and untroubled pace of gentlemen. Yet, the image of the University often conflated these two divergent legacies.

The two strains are by no means exclusively oppositional, and their boundary is further blurred by the legacy of Jefferson (the man), which encompasses them both. On the one hand, he left behind the structure of academic life and a physical architectural legacy. His vision of the University is embodied in his “academical village,” a tangible place where students and faculty would be able to interact daily and not be afraid to “follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it” (Letter to Mr. Roscoe, 1820). The actual presence of his buildings as well as the continuation of his institutional tenets contribute to the virtual presence of “Mr. Jefferson,” as if he were still living at Monticello and gazing down on his University. However, despite his revolutionary ideas and radical educational philosophy, Thomas Jefferson was an elite southern gentleman, just like the students who constituted the student body. As part of those shared values, he did not believe in educating women. His position as a southerner occasionally raised legitimate questions about his radical vision. Therefore, both those who sought change and those who sought to retard it had plausible claim to “Jeffersonian tradition.”

Under Shannon’s predecessor, Colgate Darden, change had indeed begun to creep into the University. It was steadily growing, working to improve its academic standards and coming to realize that as a public university, it would eventually have to navigate the problems of race and gender. As the University grew, its traditions were defined, defended, and challenged by students and faculty seeking to situate themselves, their University and its traditions in the new environment created by the cultural and institutional upheaval of the Sixties.

There were several flashpoints during the Sixties where proponents of change and conservatism clashed. (See specifically the other sections of this website dedicated to desegregation, co-education, and student activism.) Many times during these intense debates, both about practical steps of action and abstract ideas about students and the University, both sides used the language of tradition to make their case—that is, both sides invoked concepts associated with tradition, most commonly ideas of what it meant to be “a gentleman” and “Jeffersonian,” though they often conflated the two. Those who feared what transformations change might bring urged the strength and grandeur of UVa’s traditions to hinder it. While often railing against the insouciance valued by Southern gentlemen (it frequently translated into apathy), advocates of change also employed tradition, appealing to Jefferson’s vision for the University and traditions of free speech to justify the University’s changing shape.

In fact, beginning with the vision outlined in Shannon’s 1959 inaugural address, “Jeffersonian tradition” was more often used in support of change than the status quo. Although Jeffersonian tenets, notions such as individualism and freedom, were used by conservative members of the community—most notably in the foundation of the John Randolph Society—appeals to the man and his legacy often advocated change. In one particular instance, Professor Thomas Hammond appealed to freedom of speech and to Mr. Jefferson’s vision for the University while defending the formation of the Jefferson Chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations, a group dedicated to working towards integration.

Southern custom and the trappings of a gentleman were usually identified with conservative thinking, but as the University underwent changes in its student body and within the larger environment of cultural upheaval, even radicals drew on Southern traditions. When collections for those suffering in Mississippi after Freedom Summer in 1964 were vandalized at the University, Students for Social Action (the organizers of the drive) challenged the students to live up to their so-called “honor”—how could a community that admitted vandals be truly honorable?

One of the more interesting manifestations of the debate over the future of the University was the seemingly trivial issue of student dress. It seemed to many students, faculty, and alumni that UVa students had worn coats and ties since time immemorial and they could barely conceive of a University where the students did not wear them. More than the mere trappings of gentlemanly behavior, they were the representation of the maturity and sophistication of the student population and a reminder that UVa was distinctive from other less distinguished schools. It was even suggested that stockings and heels be appropriate attire for the few female students in attendance. Orientation issues of The Cavalier Daily almost always contained articles about advice for men on appropriately seasonal coats and ties to wear. As the Sixties progressed, these annual articles increasingly defended the tradition, even as others began to note its slow and irretrievable disappearance.

By 1974, at the inauguration of a new president, Frank Hereford, the tumult was over, and there was an inclination to return to the way things were before. The University would never again be the stronghold of white Southern manhood, but notions of gentility and honor would remain. Jefferson’s vision for the University would no longer be an impetus for change (though in many ways it no longer needed to be since the University had become the embodiment of educational excellence that he had envisioned), but concepts of liberalism and freedom remained in everything from the sacredness of student self-governance to the editorial page of The Cavalier Daily. While the Sixties did change the face of the University, admitting women and African Americans in increasing numbers and taking steps to transform itself into one of the top-rated public universities, it could not completely reverse the strong current of tradition. Rather, it was within the turbulence accompanying the Sixties at UVa that the dual nature of its traditions was most clearly manifest.

Emily Swafford