“Idle Ramblers Incapable of Application” — The 1825 Riots at the University of Virginia

On October 3, 1825, in what he later described as a "most painful event," Thomas Jefferson appeared before a gathering of students, professors, and trustees at the University of Virginia inside its now-famed Rotunda. Recent unruly student behavior had culminated in an attack on two professors with bricks and canes and threats by faculty to resign. Open less than a year, the university Jefferson had conceived, designed, and championed through Virginia’s legislature — the institution he called “the hobby of my old age” — was suddenly in jeopardy. In this latest episode of our “In the Course of Human Events” podcast, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the Saunders Director at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and author of 'The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind:' Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University," narrates the story with help from colleagues Ann Lucas and Aaron Ojalvo.