In my current engagement, "The Individual and Society", we touch on the concept of moral relativism: the idea that morals can be right or wrong depending on the time period and the culture evaluating them. To the writers of the Rockfish Gap Report, the morals of the University of Virginia were sound, so the selection of readings by professors would bolster the morals of the students attending. However, in the reading of this report, and common knowledge of what the University stood for at its inception, we adamantly detest the racism and misogyny that was allowed, if not praised, during the separate time period. This raises the question of where we should be getting our morals from; in 10, 20, 100 or even 200 years, what will be seen of the morals that we take from our families and our University? Will students at the University read our annotations as part of the quadricentennial celebration and be appalled at our morals and what the University was trying to teach us?

The subjective implementation of the word "advanced" strikes me. The writers of the Rockfish Gap Report claim that those privileged to this education would be more "advanced", but there are only very few aspects in which this is fully applicable; today we observe how they were not advanced in morality and they were not advanced in looking to the future as they claim. If they were advanced in comparison to their indigenous neighbors, then why was the Rockfish Gap Report only written for white males? The writers claim that it is "preposterous...to look backward for better things", but it is quite apparent that this group is living in the past and has no desire to leave it.

I think it is interesting (and a little nauseating) in how this is what an impartial and mature consideration was considered at the time. The idea that a consideration was considered unbiased while it only accounted for the convenience of one race is baffling; it’s a complete lack of foresight into the future of the people that would make up the university. This relates to our discussion in our evolution engagement about noticing how science is inherently biased, which can be seen in their “impartial...consideration”, which is not impartial at all. They claim how it is a mature consideration, but there is nothing mature about the fact that they are segregating such a large portion of the population in the plans to build the University of Virginia.

It could not be more explicit in stating this University was built for the white population. I wonder whether or not this would have phased anyone at the time reading this; it is one of the most striking words for us reading this paragraph, but for those writing and planning off of it, did it even cause a moment of thought? Even though historically schools, like the University of Virginia, would not be integrated for a very long time (The University did not see full integration until the 1960s), did the planners write out “White population” because that was who they were building it for at the present moment? Or was it the hope, or even assumption, of the planners that they would be able to keep it that way forever?