I find this part to be incredibly interesting, as society's attitude regarding the arts seems to have changed little since the founding of the University. The authors of the Rockfish Gap refer to the arts as "innocent," implying that they are childish and not the foundation of a mature job. The fact that UVA did not at first incorporate arts classes and professors, and rather just provided space for them, shows that they were considered a hobby rather than a profession. While UVA has made great strides in providing arts clubs, classes, and majors; society as a whole still seems to look down on the arts a job. For instance, the public school system emphasizes getting marketable majors rather than majors you enjoy. As a whole, I believe that we should give the visual and performance arts more dignity and importance as an area of education.

In the Individual and Society class, we have discussed how morality is relative to the society in which we live. Encountering this sentence at first, I believed it to be hypocritical, as it implied that the University of Virginia will teach students to improve their morals, yet only sentences earlier the report was planning the university's location based off of the white population. We have to consider these statements (and to a greater extent Thomas Jefferson) in the society of the time they were written. In modern times, these statements are racist and hypocritical, yet at the time of UVA's founding, racism was so rampant in society that that it was not collectively considered immoral.This allowed the writers of the Rockfish Gap to believe that a school could exclude minorities and promote morality without hypocrisy.