Stu Smith@thestustustudio
🚨 UVA Graduation Becomes Another Jefferson Struggle Session
This is Kenyon Bonner, UVA’s Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer, using graduation to take the now-standard UVA swipe at Jefferson.
Bonner said Jefferson’s “ethically corrosive claims about human capacity reflected his ignorance and his hubris,” adding that “ignorance precedes injustice.”
That is a pretty sweeping charge to make from the graduation stage at Jefferson’s university, especially when Jefferson’s actual record is more complicated than the flattened campus script allows.
Jefferson corresponded with Benjamin Banneker, the Black mathematician and astronomer, and wrote that “nobody wishes more than I do” to see evidence that Black Americans had “talents equal” to others.
By the standards of his era, Jefferson showed more intellectual openness than many of his contemporaries. UVA should be the last place beating him with the hammer of presentism.
The irony is that Bonner eventually admits the obvious. Jefferson’s blueprint for an educated democracy was “compelling, transcendent, and transformational.”
Exactly. That is the point. UVA exists because of Jefferson’s vision and the American university system was profoundly shaped by it.
Maybe the Chief Student Affairs Officer who all but rolled out concierge service for the encampment crowd should be a little more careful before turning graduation into another Jefferson struggle session. That’s my two cents.
It would have made this clip too long, but this moment was preceded by the usual UVA land acknowledgment, because apparently that has to come before the Jefferson-was-bad acknowledgment.