University of Virginia

The University of Virginia (UVA) was very much the personal project of the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Virginia already had a venerable and distinguished university, the College of William & Mary, which is the second-oldest in the country—founded right after Harvard—and was Jefferson’s own alma mater.

However, in Jefferson’s day, William & Mary continued to require its students to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, whereas Jefferson had become a deist—not an atheist, but not a Christian, either, and certainly not a friend to the C of E.

Jefferson was a great admirer of the French Revolution, and nothing if not a child of the Enlightenment. Therefore, he wanted his home state of Virginia to benefit from a more modern kind of university that would advance the enlightened and progressive values he held dear.

In 1817, Jefferson met with three of his friends and political colleagues, the newly elected, fifth President of the United States, James Monroe; the outgoing fourth president, James Madison; and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. At this meeting, they decided on a location for the new university near the town of Charlottesville.

Two years later, UVA received its charter from the Commonwealth of Virginia and construction began, with Jefferson himself serving as the main architect. The new university’s first classes began in 1825.

Two centuries later, UVA has become one of the premier public universities in the Old South. It has been affiliated with nine Nobel Prize laureates, namely,

• Norman Ramsey and Clinton Davisson—physics
• Alfred Gilman, Ferid Murad, & Barry Marshall—physiology or medicine
• Ronald Coase & James M. Buchanan—economics
• William Faulkner—literature
• Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919

Two UVA undergrads have gone on to win the Turing Award for outstanding achievements in the field of computer science:

• Edward M. Clarke
• John Backus

Other UVA-connected faculty and alumni include:

• Early American poet, pioneer of detective fiction, and virtuoso of the Gothic horror story form, Edgar Allan Poe
• Arctic and Antarctic explorer, Richer E. Byrd
• Painter, Georgia O’Keeffe
• Former US poet laureate, Rita Dove
• Novelist, Edward P. Jones
• Comedienne, Tina Fey
• Political analyst, Larry Sabato
• Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian
• Television personalities Brit Hume, Laura Ingraham, & Katie Couric
• Civil Rights–activist, Julian Bond
• no fewer than eight NASA astronauts