Jefferson's Secular University

Thomas Jefferson conceived the University of Virginia as a conscious departure from the pattern set by Harvard, Yale and William & Mary, all of which had begun as institutions for training clergy. He designed its central Lawn around a library rather than a chapel, a substitution he intended as an architectural argument that knowledge, not religious devotion, sat at the heart of the enterprise, and he insisted at its 1819 founding that the university appoint no professor of divinity and impose no religious test on students or faculty, an arrangement almost unheard of among American colleges at the time. This did not make the university hostile to religion so much as neutral toward it by design: students could attend services of their choice in town, and various denominations were later permitted to build seminaries adjacent to the grounds, but no faculty of theology or chair of divinity was ever part of the university's own structure, a distinction it has maintained into the present. That founding secularism is precisely what makes its later willingness to house a rigorous, empirical research program on reincarnation notable: the university's School of Medicine took on the subject not as a religious commitment but as a psychiatric research question, continuing Jefferson's original insistence that the institution's own stance toward any particular metaphysical claim remain officially uncommitted.