In Thomas Jefferson's original plan the faculty, counseled by a Board of Visitors, governed the university. By the turn of the century, the school had grown larger and more complex, and the Visitors saw the need to appoint a president. When Woodrow Wilson, a University of Virginia law graduate yet to be president, declined the offer, they turned to Edwin Anderson Alderman, well known as an innovative educator in the South and a great orator across the nation. Alderman was inaugurated on Founder's Day, April 13, 1905. Within a year, Alderman had seen to the opening of a school of education at the university.