Group of U-Va. students, faculty ‘deeply offended’ by Thomas Jefferson being quoted at school he founded

WaPo

In 1819, well after helping to found the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

It was the state’s first true public university.

Known as the “Father of the University of Virginia,” Jefferson was laid to rest at his home in Monticello, less than 10 miles from his school.

 Jefferson embodied the contradictions of his time. He was a slave owner, who wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. But Martin Luther King Jr., for example, regularly evoked Jefferson’s words in his speeches. On Sept. 12, 1962, King spoke at the New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance in New York City. There he said, “Jefferson with keen perception saw that the festering sore of slavery debilitated white masters as well as the Negro. He feared for the future of white children who were taught a false supremacy. His concern can be summed up in one quotation, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’”

Now, a group of students and faculty members at the very school Jefferson founded have chastised the university president for quoting him in a statement she made after the election of Donald Trump.

Following Trump’s victory, University President Teresa Sullivan sent an email urging students to remember their own responsibility in the world, the Cavalier Daily reported.

Sullivan wrote, “By coincidence, on this exact day 191 years ago — November 9, 1825, in the first year of classes at U.Va. — Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes.’ I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”...  
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