Welcome
The University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, is the flagship public university in the state. Designed as an enlightenment university committed to student self-governance and an elective curriculum that included both classical education and modern applied disciplines and learning, it was by 1860 one of the largest universities in the United States. Reflecting Virginia's position as a slave state with more enslaved people than any other state, UVA graduated generations of citizen leaders, many of whom remained committed to pro-slavery ideology as adult doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, soldiers, and politicians. Seven of sixteen members of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's cabinet 1861-65 were graduates of UVA. After 1865, The Lost Cause mythologized slave society as noble, falsely reimagined secession as about state sovereignty, argued that former enslaved Black Americans were incapable of citizenship and freedom, and declared white rule as necessary. The term Lost Cause was actually coined by UVA alumnus Edward Alfred Pollard in 1866. Many other UVA graduates committed themselves to articulating and spreading the myth of the Lost Cause in the decades after 1865. The university's contemporary memorialized landscape, while largely honoring professors, administrators, and alumni, remains complicated as it sometimes reflects the realities of UVA's histories of bondage, Confederate participation, Lost Cause mythologizing, and advocacy for white supremacist pseudo-scientific ideas and also segregation. Today's university landscape, however, also reflects great change, with new memorialization acknowledging unsung founders and change agents in the school's history.