University of Virginia Library

Life On The Lawn

Suggestions over the years regarding what
to do with Mr. Jefferson's Lawn have ranged
from grazing animals to growing marijuana.
Most of the ideas, however, have attempted to
chart the course of the Lawn along the
original Jeffersonian lines, a course from
which the Lawn has strayed over the years
since it was built. Today the Lawn houses a
non-functional Rotunda; fifty-odd fourth-year
students chosen for academic and extra-curricular
achievement; two administrative office
buildings in Pavilions V and VIII; a faculty
club in Pavilion VI; and the families of seven
senior faculty members in the rest of the
pavilions.

The present arrangement is not a bad one,
but it clearly does not embody the potential
which the Lawn has to become the vital
center of learning and communication on the
Grounds. In an effort to move the Lawn
towards that goal, Mr. Lester Beaurline of the
English Department has formulated a plan to
change the Lawn into a residential college
which he feels will combine the best of
Jeffersonian and modern ideas for an
educational system.

His plans call for removing senior faculty
members, the faculty club, the administrative
offices and the degree candidates from the
positions they now occupy. The senior faculty
members would be replaced by younger men,
more inclined to communicate with students
than the present residents. He feels, and
rightly so, that the present arrangement does
not, in fact, foster the communication that
Mr. Jefferson intended; rather it impedes it,
institutionalizing the generation gap between
the students and older faculty members. Mr.
Beaurline would move the faculty club to
Monroe Hill, freeing the pavilion it now
occupies for student residents. He would force
the Administration to find new office space.
In place of the present fourth-year students,
Mr. Beaurline would have first and second
year students, figuring that it is this group,
rather than the more established fourth-year
men, who most need the benefits of Lawn
life. In the Colonnade Club and the Pavilions,
which enjoy comparatively modern plumbing,
Mr. Beaurline would house women students,
making of the Lawn a small, coeducational
residential college upon which the rest of the
University might model its future growth.

His ideas face tough sledding, not because
they have no merit, but because they seek to
displace some of the most powerful people at
the University. Yet it would be a shame if
they were given only perfunctory study by
those responsible for University planning.