I found this to be a very interesting line that I had looked over the last time I read this. This, personally, is a subject I feel strongly about. I am a big proponent of public education, and I disagree with the people they describe here that believe education is a private concern, because education is most definitely a public concern. This gives me more respect for the writers of this report and Jefferson for wanting to create a public university that would make education a public, and not private, effort.

I recently went on a historical tour of UVA and therefore find this requirement quite interesting. Originally, there were the pavilions and the rotunda, and the lawn stretched indefinitely towards the side where Old Cabell Hall is now located. I wonder why they wanted it to be indefinite, maybe to show the scope of the students' futures? However, once it became legal for freed slaves to own land, many of the freed slaves owned land that was visible when facing towards that indefinite stretch of land. There needed to be another academic building, and it was because of the land there that they chose to close the gap of indefinence with Old Cabell rather than continuing to build outwards so that the students and faculty would not have to see the land owned by the freed slaves. That is why the "Z" on the steps of Old Cabell is black and not white. I just thought this was something interesting, and shows the strength of racism to prevent the University from carrying out Jefferson's wishes to keep an "indefinite extent" on one side of the lawn.

Here, as others have mentioned, Jefferson shows his intolerance for people of other cultures and races. I assume the "indigenous neighbours" he refers to are the Native Americans that we as Americans kicked out of their land and homes. To answer his rhetorical question, obviously things other than education have advanced people beyond their condition: race, for one thing, allows white people to gain a great advantage over indigenous people, whether educated or not. In addition, there are many types of education, as can be seen earlier when Jefferson discusses the inevitability of people arguing over what types of education should be mandatory at UVA, saying they will encounter "much difference of opinion." Therefore, who is Jefferson to call them less educated just because they are educated in different ways than white people? Sometimes it is easy to be blinded from some of Jefferson's less likeable opinions, and it is important to recognize these qualities when learning about him and the University's past. Matt F. Discussion

I find this to be very ironic that a deciding factor of the university location was the area's fertility, and yet another factor is the "centrality to the white population." These two things seem to almost contradict one another when taking in the context of the time period. Fertility, to me, means how well an area can be farmed and used for planting things, etc. In that time, many slaves worked on plantations and areas that would be fertile so as to make good profit. So it seems that many areas of land that would be fertile would have a larger population of African-Americans than in non-fertile areas of Virginia. This, then, makes it seem rather ironic that they want it to be fertile AND in an area central to white people, considering anywhere that is fertile is not going to be only white. Perhaps this is a stretch, but this jumped out at me and showed the irony of wanting to be in a mainly white area, yet also wanting fertility. Matt F. Discussion