is part of an ongoing series of conversations between the filmmaker and professor O'Shaughnessy about the University of Virginia and its Founder.

Thomas Jefferson was intimately involved with every aspect of creating the University of Virginia. It represented what he regarded as one of his three greatest achievements in life. His vision and its execution did indeed reveal his greatest talents as a lawyer who drafted the legislation; a politician who cajoled the assembly into supporting him against furious opposition; an architect who designed the layout, chose the building materials and corresponded with the craftsman; and as an intellectual who developed an innovative curriculum, suggested the books for the library and who developed the criteria for selecting the faculty. He sought the best advice both at him and abroad while relying on many others to assist him but it was ultimately his ideas which prevailed. It was all the more remarkable for a man in his late seventies and early eighties. Until his death, he rode to the university at least two or three times a week, overseeing the construction and the library, while he entertained members of the first class of students, despite his financial bankruptcy every Sunday at Monticello. He spent his last visit to the university opening boxes of newly arrived book for the library and he died in the process of trying to create a botanical garden.

The subject of the founding of the university remains relevant because Jefferson was concerned with what remains a perennial issue which is the importance of higher education in the success of the republican democratic experiment. He famously wrote that ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’” He had a vision whose creativity still has the potential to stimulate discussion about the role of universities. In contrast to the bland mission statements of the majority of modern universities, his own description of the role of universities was poetic, emotionally engaging and continues to resonate, like his famous invocation of the “illimitable freedom of the human mind.” The university was the apex of a much broader vision of public education and his desire for what he called “a general diffusion of knowledge” He advocated and wrote a bill for public education in Virginia when no country had a fully-fledged public school system, not even Prussia. It is all the more interesting that the statesman who is most frequently quoted for his anti-government sentiments made a case for the enlargement of government into the social sphere that was opposed by other intellectuals and radicals, fearful of the imposition of a uniformity of opinion by government and believing that education should be left to the private sector, like John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Paine. Like the Declaration of Independence for America, the loftier aspirations of Jefferson’s vision for the university were not fully realized in practice in Virginia. It shares in common the ability to continue to inspire in a more inclusive world.
The book will describe the remarkable personal achievement and the richness of his vision. In the context of the United States, it will argue that his ideas were distinctive even unique, but that the revolutionary elements have either become too widespread to seem novel or have disappeared. It will make the case that his vision​ has had an influence more generally upon American education

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