Return Visit to the Academical Village
Last week I got to spend a couple of days in Charlottesville, Virginia and environs. I did my graduate work at UVA, and while that was not the happiest period of my life, every day I took delight in the beauty of Mr. Jefferson’s architecture and in the still greater beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was delightful to revisit the place.
We have in that state a college (Wm. & Mary) just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it. it is moreover eccentric in it’s position, exposed to bilious diseases as all the lower country is, & therefore abandoned by the public care, as that part of the country itself is in a considerable degree by it’s inhabitants. We wish to establish in the upper & healthier country, & more centrally for the state an University on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronising with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink of the cup of knolege & fraternize with us. the first step is to obtain a good plan; that is a judicious selection of the sciences, & a practicable grouping of some of them together, & ramifying of others, so as to adapt the professorships to our uses, & our means.... I will venture even to sketch the sciences which seem useful & practicable for us, as they occur to me while holding my pen. Botany. Chemistry. Zoology. Anatomy. Surgery. Medecine. Natl. Philosophy. Agriculture. Mathematics. Astronomy. Geology. Geography. Politics. Commerce. History. Ethics. Law. Arts. Fine arts. This list is imperfect because I make it hastily, and because I am unequal to the subject. It is evident that some of these articles are too much for one professor & must therefore be ramified; others may be ascribed in groupes to a single professor. This is the difficult part of the work, & requires a hand perfectly knowing the extent of each branch, & the limits within which it may be circumscribed; so as to bring the whole within the powers of the fewest professors possible, & consequently within the degree of expence practicable for us. We should propose that the professors follow no other calling, so that their whole time may be given to their academical functions: and we should propose to draw from Europe the first characters in science, by considerable temptations, which would not need to be repeated after the first set should have prepared fit successors & given reputation to the institution. From some splendid characters I have received offers most perfectly reasonable & practicable.
— Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 27 January 1800. Turns out it’s not just today’s academic administrators who want to get by with “the fewest professors possible.”
Warren Ellis, who I think coined the phrase “Republic of Newsletters,” has been writing some interesting things about the genre: one, two, three. Re: Ellis’s comment on costs: not everyone knows this, I have learned, but while most of the newsletter services are free below a certain number of subscribers (usually 1000), there are escalating charges once you cross that threshold.
“Sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.” — Henry Eliot on his brother T. S.
I explained why you should #ShunTheTake and explained that the publication of a book always reveals glitches, brain farts, and errors.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Grading almost done....
- Music: Every once in a while I say this: there is no pop song more perfect, and perfectly lovely, than Paul Simon’s “René and Georgette Magritte and Their Dog After the War.”
- Reading: Still having fun with the Library of America’s selection of 1950s SF, for which they’ve made a great website.
- Food: I so enjoyed eating with friends at Charlottesville’s venerable C&O. The tuna cruda I had as an appetizer is one of the best things I’ve ever eaten there.
- Drink: Last week, as I traveled to Virginia and then the nation’s capital, was The Week of Many Cocktails.
