I think one interesting thing about this document is the focus by Jefferson and the other founders on giving each student the education necessary to establish his own agency in the world. They wanted every graduate of UVA to be equipped to make his own way in the world, and in many ways that is still one of the primary goals of the University. But I think now the focus is on expanding that idea to the entire population, rather than restricting it to one population and thereby promoting the supremacy of white male landowners even further.

I think my first semester here has been reflective of the goals expressed by the founders in the Rockfish Gap report in some ways, and very different from their goals in others. There has been a notable focus on guiding students to expand their thinking and reflection on different moral and philosophical dilemmas and this is something that I think was a goal of the original founders in establishing this university. But there is also a big focus on diversity and equality among the different populations and trying to understand and include people of many different backgrounds which is obviously something that the authors of this report would never have imagined. In this respect I think that many of the points about the goals of education made in this document are still a part of the University experience here, but they are no longer limited to one group of people and they have been allowed to grow and flourish to include nearly every subject and discipline.

In this situation "every citizen" really only means white men. Its interesting to consider how, despite Jefferson's reputation as a champion of equality, they only intended to educate a very narrow portion of the population in the founding of UVA.

Reading official documents from this time period that include this kind of blatant and intentional discrimination are really such a good insight into how people in this time period thought about race. It seems so shocking to us that they would pick a location for the university based on race but for them that was the most natural idea in the world. It allows you to see how deeply ingrained racism was at this time.