Reflection on the Democratic Writing Project: Overall, I believe that learning about the Rockfish Gap Report is incredibly important, however group annotation may not be the best way to go about it. Rather than connecting the document to Danielle Allen or other writers and speakers from the engagement series, the annotations seem to be more superficial. An alternative for the project could be group projects or discussions about different aspects of the report. If we want to connect the document to Danielle Allen, we could compare and contrast the Rockfish Gap with the Declaration of Independence.

I find it interesting that Ethics was considered its own class at the inception of the University, as in modern times ethics is typically not incorporated into required curriculum. However, the New Curriculum is able to reflect this original intent for UVA by requiring Ethical Engagement classes.

This relates to a reading we did in the class "The Individual and Society". The reading was a piece by Richard Rodriguez where he argues that the phrase "minority student" is a paradox, as he feels that education is the key to moving away from minority status. Essentially, he is saying that education is our key to equal opportunity. This relates to this sentence in the Rockfish Gap, as the authors also argue that education is the barrier between themselves and the indigenous peoples.

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.