II. Beginning and Length of the Session
The first of February, 1825, as we have seen, was
chosen as the day for the first session to begin. Would
that date have been preferred had all the English professors
been expected to arrive four months earlier?
To start upon the work of each session in the midst of
the most rigorous section of winter, when travel was very
frequently halted by frost and snow, and to protract it
through that part of the summer when the heat was most
ardent and debilitating, seemed, on its face, to be an
arbitrary and irrational arrangement. But the cause of
its adoption lay in the impression that Eastern Virginia,
and the States farther south, were the regions most likely
to patronize the University; and that the mountain climate
in the dog-days would be certain to increase the number
of students from those points of the compass. There
were friends of the institution, however, who refused to
accept this practical reason as a justification. "Think
of two hundred boys," exclaimed Gilmer, "festering each
in one of those little rooms in August or July! The very
idea is suffocating."
July, with its scorching sun, had not yet arrived when
the students pleaded with the executive committee,
through the Faculty, for a holiday of ten days or more,
on the perfectly sensible ground of the unusual length of
the session and the stifling and wilting temperature that
was then prevailing. Jefferson, from the cool heights
and airy apartments of Monticello, drily replied that
"there was but one vacation in the year, and this extended
from December 15 to January 31." In the privacy of
his own mind, he was probably astonished that these
youthful students, with such novel and extraordinary opportunities
for learning, should not have asked for the
abolition of even the interval of rest which he mentioned.
Ten and one half months to be given up to work and one
month and a half to play seemed to him a rational proportion;
but the boys, exasperated by the heats of August,
responded to his veiled rebuke by breaking out in a rebellion
that greatly angered and perplexed the authorities
at first; but their obduracy softened; and on October
7 (1825), the Board of Visitors decided that, thereafter,
the annual vacation should begin on August 1, and terminate
on September 11, with a recess at Christmas, which
was to continue for a period of at least two weeks. The
second session opened on February 1, 1826. The Board,
on October 4, of that year, resolved that the third session
should begin on February 1, and end on July 4, and that
afterwards the session should begin on the 20th of August,
and end on the 4th of July. A recess of two weeks
was to intervene at Christmas. On December 16 (1826)
the Board made a second change: the session was to begin
on September 1, and end on July 20. In July, 1828,
September 10 was designated as the day of opening; in
1834, September 1, and the session was to terminate on
the 4th of July. There was little alteration thereafter
during this period.
In 1838, the Faculty objected so strongly to the Christmas
recess that they asked the Board to abolish it. Although
no holiday besides the twenty-fifth was allowed
in December, 1830, at least forty of the students left the
precincts; and the professors made no attempt to lecture,
since the young men who remained at the University refused
to attend. In 1834, it was formally announced
that, should the students pointedly stay away from the
classroom during the Christmas period, the lectures should
be considered to have been delivered, and when the examinations
were held in each school, the most searching
questions were to be put on that part of the course which
had been so flagrantly neglected by them. It was the
adoption of rules like this,—which seemed to have their
springs in a vindictive mood,—that partly explains the
insubordination that came so violently to the surface so
often during these early years. Taken with the refusal
to continue the immemorial Christmas holiday, or to acknowledge,
from the start, that the blistering hours of
July and August were not the time for study, this regulation
of 1834 demonstrated that the Faculty and the Visitors
were at least partly deserving of the unpopularity
which they aroused in those youthful minds.
There was at least one professor, however, who disapproved
of these exasperating restrictions and punishments.
This was Tucker, the oldest and the most experienced of
them all. In 1835, he advised that a recess at Christmas
should be formally granted, as the new rule, requiring the
prolongation of the lectures through the holidays, had
only left the classrooms as empty as in the foregoing
years. He summarized the reasons for again conceding
the recess, and it will be pertinent to restate them, as
they bring out certain conditions that prevailed in the
University during this period of its history. The grounds
in favor were: (1) parents were willing for their sons to
visit their homes at that time; (2) all public and private
business was then suspended; (3) the season was given
up to merry-making and relaxation; (4) it was impossible
to force the students into disloyalty to customs which
were cherished under every Virginian roof, and were
shared in even by the humblest of the slaves; (5) the
regular session was so protracted that a short vacation
would turn out to be a relief; and it was at Christmas
that it could be most conveniently allowed. In opposition
to these reasons, it was said, (1) that the intermediate
examinations were held in January, and a holiday in
December was a poor preparation for them; (2) that
the roads were so unfathomable in winter that there could
be no regularity in the return of the absentees, and a
recess of ten days at that season really signified the loss
of a month; (3) that it increased the expense of college
life; and (4) that the students from remote States, having
no inducement to leave the precincts, would be tempted
by idleness to fall into dissipation, which would be damaging
to the good name of the institution.
The chairman's recommendation in favor of granting
a recess failed to receive the Visitors' approval; but so
numerous were the vacant seats in the lecture-rooms in
December, 1836, that the Faculty were constrained to
connive at the violation of the regulation. A student who
was curtly summoned before that body to explain his refusal
to be present at his classes, obtained an acquittal
by proving that two of his professors had left the University
for the holidays, and that the third had voluntarily
discontinued his course for the time being.
