The Dishonor Code

*Note: this transcript is from the original show broadcast. There may be slight differences from the rebroadcast.

PETER: Now, a few decades before that late 19th century boom in vocational schools, American educators had watched the progress of a rather different experiment in higher education. That was the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. When it opened six years later, UVA was supposed to be an academical village– a forward looking community with no religious affiliation, a place where Virginia’s brightest young minds could go to study with the world’s most serious scholars.

BRIAN: But the students who came to this new school– well, they didn’t quite live up to Jefferson’s expectations. Carlos Santos is a journalist who’s written about the school’s tumultuous early years. I asked him to help me understand the culture of violence that dominated student life in the early 19th century.

Carlos, I teach a lot of students here at UVA, and, you know, the kind of discipline problems I run into are people checking their email, Twitter, occasionally watching entire movies during my lectures. I understand life was pretty different back in the first couple of decades at UVA.

CARLOS SANTOS: It’s really hard to fathom how violent the students were. The slightest insult– a mean look– that was enough to set them off. They had hair trigger tempers, and they would bite each other, they’d fight, they’d hit each other with fists, rocks, sticks. They would use knives, they would shoot at each other. Luckily, weapons were so primitive they rarely hit each other.

Sometimes they’d set off bombs. They did it to professors a number of times. The students were so violent that Jefferson at one point was brought to tears, and it was because of their violence. And he saw that as something that might bring his school to its knees.

BRIAN: What efforts did the professors and administrators– I know there were a smaller number back then– make to rein in some of this violence and chaotic activity by the students?

CARLOS SANTOS: Right. They tried. The professors tried a number of things, and they all just failed miserably.

BRIAN: What were some of them? I want to make sure I don’t repeat these errors.

CARLOS SANTOS: I don’t think they would work today either. Early morning rising law. That law, which was enacted a few years after the school opened, required students to get up at 5:30 in the morning.

BRIAN: All right, I can predict this is not going to work.

CARLOS SANTOS: It didn’t. They hated it. It was the most hated law–

BRIAN: What was the thinking? I mean, honestly, what was the thinking behind the early morning rising law?

CARLOS SANTOS: Well, the thinking was that if they had to get up that early in the morning, they wouldn’t carouse all night. Honestly, that was it. And of course, the belief that–

BRIAN: Only a bunch of professors would conclude that.

CARLOS SANTOS: Next one was the uniform law. That was another hated law. You know, students loved to dress in this faddish clothing. They had colorful jackets and pantaloons and crazy hats, and the professors didn’t want them to do that for two reasons. One, critics of the university believed it was the playground for the rich and violent, and they dressed very expensively. And the professors didn’t want that image.

So they made them wear just simple gray uniforms. Just a gray jacket and gray pants. And the students hated it.

The other reason, of course, they wanted to wear these gray uniforms is when they were in town or wherever they were, professors could ID them right away. So if they were in trouble, they could say, ah, that’s one of ours. Of course, that didn’t work either.

BRIAN: So I have read about this kind of unruliness, and sometimes even mob violence at other colleges like Princeton. Was there anything that distinguished UVA from other universities?

CARLOS SANTOS: The riots– for example, Harvard had its rotten cabbage riot about bad food, and they’d break out windows and fight the local police. So I think UVA had more of a– because it was a southern institution, southerners, at least according to people who have studied them in depth, at that time, were more willing to fight. And they also carried this sense of honor with them.

That sense of honor meant that they had to be treated with the utmost of respect, because honor was bestowed on them by other people. It didn’t come from inside themselves. So how they were treated in public made them men.

So there was no distinct difference from other riots in other colleges. I just think there was more violence than any other college.

BRIAN: But it does seem like UVA was different in that it was not religiously affiliated. Did that make a difference?

CARLOS SANTOS: I don’t think it did to the violence, but of course, that was the reason the violence mattered. There was a public relations problem going on at the University of Virginia. Jefferson, who’s beloved today, of course, was despised by many people back in his lifetime. And he made no more friends when he started the University of Virginia and said there would be no professor of theology.

This was in an era when the law had just been pushed off the books where it was a crime to not believe in the holy trinity. And so for Jefferson to start a school that had no religious affiliation was anathema to many people, especially in Virginia. So they began to criticize the school when they saw all this violence, a murder of a professor. They wanted it shuttered.

BRIAN: Did you say murder a professor?

CARLOS SANTOS: Yes. A professor. The violence actually culminated in the murder, in 1840, of John Davis, who was a professor of law. On that particular night, around 9:00 PM, while they’re shooting off guns and lighting tar barrels and ringing the rotunda bell and just behaving like wild students, one student– his name was John Semmes– he was from Georgia– for some reason loaded a pistol.

Professor Davis was tired of all the noise and racket and explosions and shootings. He was just weary. I’m sure you would be, too.

And he came out and grabbed this short guy. Semmes turned around, shot at abdomen. The bullet entered his abdomen, went down his groin, and into his leg. It took him several days to die, but the professor eventually did die.

And Semmes took off. They eventually captured them with the aid of students, believe it or not, because usually students banded together. But they were so horrified by this they finally went after Semmes. They got him.

He was from a very rich family, but they brought him back to Charlottesville. They put a $25,000 bond. He made the bond– $25,000, which back then was, of course, an incredible fortune– and never came back.

BRIAN: Carlos, thanks so much for taking us through this early history of the University of Virginia. I feel much better about my students tweeting.

CARLOS SANTOS: Thanks for inviting me.

BRIAN: Carlos Santos is the author, with Rex Bowman, of Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America.