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The university has long been obsessed with the metaphor of Jefferson’s shadow. At the centennial celebration in 1921, the university mounted a pageant, in its new amphitheater, titled Shadow of the Builder. The script is not always subtle, as when Jefferson walks on to the amphitheater’s stage for the first time:
A shadow falls upon them, the natural, morning shadow of Thomas Jefferson who has come silently up the steps at the end of the terrace. Jefferson is a tall, old man in an old-fashioned, snowy stock, and suit of homely gray broadcloth.
At one point the marquis de Lafayette, speaking before a crowd on the Lawn, makes reference to the university, which was still under construction in 1824. “Its white colonnades are yet empty of young life,” he intones, “but a shadow falls along them daily. Athwart the centuries, so that your sons and their sons in turn shall walk within it, still will stretch the shadow of the friend of freedom, of truth, Thomas Jefferson.”
As a third century begins, I think that more than ever the university is feeling uncomfortable in that shadow. The manly, martial patriotism on display at the hundred-year mark — the sheer confidence of it — no longer feels quite right.
When neo-Nazis marched on the Lawn last August, a small cadre of students and staff bravely defended the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the north side of the Rotunda. A few weeks later students covered that same statue with a black shroud, denouncing Jefferson as a white supremacist. A subsequent student council meeting erupted into shouts of anger as students debated demands made by the university’s Black Student Alliance. Few people know about the “sex” scandal from 1954, but a since-discredited Rolling Stone article in 2014 about an alleged rape on Grounds brought to the surface many of the challenges and obstacles faced by women at the university — everything from harassment to horrific violence. More recent controversies have involved the role of big money at the university.
“One of the objects in my book is Philip Alexander Bruce’s five volumes,” I tell the reporter. “Nothing quite like it has been written since, largely because we’ve lost that confidence in what this place is — which isn’t always such a bad thing, honestly. There is really remarkable history and commemoration being done by students and scholars right now — the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, the JUEL project, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. A book about slavery is in the works and another one about the founding. My thing is just a blip although perhaps it’s not a coincidence that a bicentennial history in 100 objects is so modest, atomized even.”