Great source for opposition quotes.

Coming to UVA, I felt a sense of disillusionment regarding this very point — that reading is a paradigm for moral and cognitive improvement — as most students, it seems, lack a genuine interest in courses that require them to hit the books. Students lament about the English requirements that have to complete rather than lauding the courses they’re enrolled in, which is an indication that they are not learning for the sake self-improvement. I’m taking two English classes right now (with 17 books between them) because I believe in this very ideal embedded in UVA’s founding document, that the human mind is lost without literature and that it can only grow with the more material it absorbs. Reading changes the way you think and speak and write, allowing you to perceive your other studies and the world-at-large through wiser lenses. Today’s UVA needs a drastic change in pedagogical culture such that we might return to the importance Jefferson placed on reading.

There is a certain kind of pompousness that hovers in this excerpt of the document: that, "with the sentiments of the legislature in favor of freedom of religion manifested on former occasions," the authors see themselves as the noble torchbearers of free religious thought. In choosing to not appoint a professor of divinity, they defer the task of religious teachings to the ethics professor — saying, high-browly, that their mere decision to not establish a position dedicated to divinity is the equivalent of religious inclusivity. Yet, in the very same breath, they outline that this ethics-cum-divinity professor has the responsibility to prove and profess the existence of "a god, the creator, preserver, & supreme ruler of the universe," in addition to teaching "all the relations of morality, & of the laws & obligation these infer" from a God-centric lens. How unethical must it be to chain a professor of ethics to the confines of religion every time he stands before his class, to tailor his syllabus to a distinctively Christian narrative (rather than a distinctively philosophical narrative) well before the syllabus is even written!

While I believe the authors acted in good faith given the circumstances of their time, it goes without saying that their noble case in favor of free religious belief cannot be — and was not — achieved by simply lacking a teacher whose job was to solely preach Christianity; instead, they disguised their Sunday-School lectures behind the vague veil of "ethics" — marring the classes' material, for better or for worse, with a my-way-or-the-highway belief in God.

This line is completely damning evidence of the authors' inherent classism, favoring to avoid building a hospital simply because the poor would, in their minds, overrun it. "Medicine... cannot well be [taught] without the accessory of a hospital," the report states, underscoring that hospitals are foundational to the pedagogy of medicine as they provide students with tangible medical experience. Yet, in the same breath, the report says that the University of Virginia is unable to support a hospital in its infancy because of "the numbers of poor, who would leave their own houses, and accept the charities of an hospital." This language presents Charlottesville's impoverished people as mere dependents looking for handouts, opting to live in the hospital rather than their own homes. And, to make matters worse, the authors propose that the way to prevent this problem is to hire a single professor to teach both the medicine and anatomy classes, which constructs a complete contradiction between the value they place on medicine and the fiscal backing they propose for UVA's medical division — all because the poor would flood the hospital, should the University allocate the money needed for construction.

This passage, in the grand scheme of the report, is rather unsettling: In a document that sets out to determine the foundation of the University of Virginia, the authors make a tangental quip against Native Americans, deriding not only their faculties of intelligence but also their practices and customs. The construction of the beginning of the first sentence — "What, but education..." — posits schooling as the sole reason why white settlers overcame Native Americans, making the argument that the Commonwealth must prioritize educating its youth so that posterity doesn't match their dismal view of Native Americans' civility. Moreover, the authors neglect to acknowledge the innumerable injuries that deterred indigenous populations' ability to succeed — like, for instance, forced migration, the introduction of European diseases, or theft of resources. The authors, then, deride and dehumanize Native Americans, writing that the indigenous peoples are enslaved to "barbarism and wretchedness," and yearn for society to "return to the days of eating acorns and roots" just like animals do. Such condescending and vicious words do not logically belong in a report calling for the foundation of a university — and, yet, the fact that this racist sidebar was included in "Rockfish Gap" means that the authors believed a meditation on Native Americans' perceived-savagery would appeal to the General Assembly's reception of the document.