Mr. Jefferson's university breaks up

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by David L. Kirp, Patrick S. Roberts

This fund raising hasn't been undertaken on behalf of "the university"; only $50 million raised in the campaign can be used as U.Va. chooses. Rather, the focus has been on raising money for particular schools or departments to which alumni feel a special attachment.

Meanwhile, across the U.Va. campus, units are following Darden's example. Foremost among them is the McIntire School of Commerce, the undergraduate business school which, borrowing from the Darden playbook, has gone into the graduate-training business. In just three years, enrollment in its graduate-degree programs has jumped from 40 to 300, and the school is about to open a new branch in northern Virginia. "We have taken our graduate programs private," says Dean Carl Zeithaml, echoing his Darden colleagues. "They are basically a huge net cash flow into the school. We pay a tax, a franchise fee to be part of the U.Va. umbrella."

The McIntire School has launched a multi-million dollar, privately funded construction of a new building, and the economics department, long eager to escape its decrepit home in Rouss Hall, may not be far behind. Although the campus administration turned down its request to build a new building, the department, undeterred, is threatening to woo donors whose gifts can be used only for this restricted purpose. When that money arrives, the economists reason, the campus will have to go along. Economics professor Edgar Olsen hopes that fund raising becomes a responsibility of departments, not schools, a prospect that chills impoverished departments like linguistics. "When people complain that Darden has these lavish buildings and we have these crappy buildings, I say that's fine. We should go raise our own money," argues Olsen. Melvin Leffler, the dean of Arts and Sciences, took this idea of entrepreneurialism to heart. When he failed to extract additional funds from the campus administration, he morphed into a m oney raiser, hiring one of Darden's development officers to manage the effort.

"Businversity"

In some respects, this market-driven activity matches Thomas Jefferson's vision. U.Va. was never meant to be the Harvard of the South. Unlike Harvard, it wasn't primarily devoted to the education of clergy, teachers, and lawyers, and it wasn't committed to a unified classical education. Rather, Jefferson imagined a collection of specialized schools in close proximity to one another, essentially graduate schools that granted specialized degrees both in traditional subjects like philosophy and in new academic fields like medicine. Ahead of his time as ever, Jefferson was contemplating what has become known as the "multiversity." But there is one major difference: Jefferson believed that a university merited public support because it served the public good. The Darden School represents the triumph of the private good--what might be termed the "businversity."

Then as now, it was hard to secure public backing. "My hopes are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures," Jefferson wrote a friend, "the members of which do not generally possess information enough to perceive the important truths, that knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness." In 2001, amid the recession, the state's contribution to U.Va. was again cut, and faculty hiring was frozen in several units of the university, including the College of Arts and Sciences.