Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the University of Virginia: An American age of reason, religion, and republicanism

This study concerns the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the University of Virginia; Jefferson and the specter of American republicanism; and Jefferson's views pertaining to theism, deism, science, human reason, morality, and the controversial ideological domain of antisectarianism. Historians, have been fascinated by, and have been equally divided in their opinions regarding, Jefferson's view of religious sectarianism, particularly in terms of its role in the perpetuation of republican virtues (of high moralism), and they have been equally polarized by their interpretations of issues pertaining to Jefferson's theory of knowledge and of individual freedoms. This fascination, or, perhaps more appropriately, this intense scrutinization, has led to similar divisions regarding the importance of Jefferson's agenda for denying religious sects their commensurate positions of power, in the form of professorships, or other authoritative positions in academic governance, at the University of Virginia and in other public institutions of learning and/or of political regency.;The manuscript that follows, as a direct result of these various polemical viewpoints, examines the main themes at work in our attempts to rationalize, and to reconcile, secular learning with moral instruction, religious diversity and the rights of individual conscience, with the overall aims and objectives of America's collegiate franchises; it also offers a critical examination of the forces at play both prior to and during the founding of America's initial institution for the sole implementation of the scientific curriculum; this dissertation also peers into the compatibility of the republican college, with the express nature of republican participation, and then attempts to compare these observations to the more abstract entities of social equity and democracy. The study concludes with a close look at the religious proclivities of Thomas Paine and offers some insight into Thomas Jefferson's antisectarian reform recommendations, particularly noting the degree to which the elder statesman's attempts to promote universal Christian values, can be misinterpreted in such a way that they may suggest, to many, that Jefferson is in fact an atheistic foe of religion.