1800s , the university's founder, by
Gilbert Stuart () , as pictured from the South Lawn|leftIn 1802, while serving as president of the United States,
Thomas Jefferson wrote to artist
Charles Willson Peale that his concept of the new university would be "on the most extensive and liberal scale that our circumstances would call for and our faculties meet," and it might even attract talented students from "other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge." Virginia was already home to the
College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, but Jefferson lost all confidence in his
alma mater, partly because of its religious nature—it required all its students to recite a
catechism—and its stifling of the sciences. Jefferson had flourished under
William & Mary professors
William Small and
George Wythe decades earlier, but the college was in a period of great decline and his concern became so dire by 1800 that he expressed to British chemist
Joseph Priestley, "we have in that State, a college just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it." These words would ring true some seventy years later when William & Mary fell bankrupt after the
Civil War and the Williamsburg college was shuttered completely in 1881, later being revived as primarily a small college for teachers until it regained university status later in the twentieth century. Jefferson envisioned his new university would "be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." In 1817, three presidents (Jefferson,
James Monroe, and
James Madison) and
Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall joined 24 other dignitaries at a meeting held in the Mountain Top Tavern at
Rockfish Gap. After some deliberation, they selected nearby Charlottesville as the site of the new University of Virginia. The UVA Board of Visitors purchased just outside
Charlottesville a farm that had once been owned by James Monroe. The Commonwealth of Virginia chartered a new flagship university to be based on the site in Charlottesville on January 25, 1819.
John Hartwell Cocke collaborated with James Madison, Monroe, and Joseph Carrington Cabell to fulfill Jefferson's dream to establish the university. Cocke and Jefferson were appointed to the building committee to supervise the construction. The UVA Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights is continuing to "seek opportunities to engage and acknowledge with respect that we live, learn, and work on [what once was] the territory of the
Monacan Indian Nation." Like many of its peers, the university owned slaves who helped build the campus. They also served students and professors. The university's first classes met on March 7, 1825. In contrast to other universities of the day, at which one could study in either medicine, law, or divinity, the first students at the University of Virginia could study in one or several of eight independent schools – medicine, law, mathematics, chemistry, ancient languages, modern languages, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. Another innovation of the new university was that higher education would be separated from religious doctrine. UVA had no divinity school, was established independently of any religious sect, and
the Grounds were planned and centered upon a library,
the Rotunda, rather than a church, distinguishing it from peer universities still primarily functioning as seminaries for one particular strain of Protestantism or another. Jefferson opined to philosopher
Thomas Cooper that "a professorship of theology should have no place in our institution", and never has there been one. There were initially two degrees awarded by the university:
Graduate, to a student who had completed the courses of one school; and
Doctor to a graduate in more than one school who had shown research prowess. Jefferson was intimately involved in the university to the end, hosting Sunday dinners at his
Monticello home for faculty and students. Jefferson viewed the university's foundation as having such great importance and potential that he counted it among his greatest accomplishments and insisted his grave mention only his status as author of the
Declaration of Independence and
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. Thus, he eschewed mention of his national accomplishments, such as the
Louisiana Purchase and any other aspects of his presidency, in favor of his role with the young university. Initially, some of the students arriving at the university matched the then-common picture of college students: wealthy, spoiled aristocrats with a sense of privilege which often led to brawling, or worse. This was a source of frustration for Jefferson, who assembled the students during the school's first year, on October 3, 1825, to criticize such behavior; but was too overcome to speak. He later spoke of this moment as "the most painful event" of his life. was the second rector of the University of Virginia until 1836. Although the frequency of such irresponsible behavior dropped after Jefferson's expression of concern, it did not die away completely. Like many universities and colleges, it experienced periodic
student riots, culminating in the shooting death of Professor
John A. G. Davis, Chairman of the Faculty, in 1840. This event, in conjunction with
the new UVA Honor System and the growing popularity of temperance and a rise in religious affiliation in society in general, seems to have resulted in a permanent change in student attitudes toward reporting the bad behavior, and thus such behavior among students that had so greatly bothered Jefferson finally vanished. The
Raven Society, an organization named after Poe's most famous poem, continues to maintain 13 West Range, the room Poe inhabited during the single semester he attended the university. He left because of financial difficulties. The
School of Engineering and Applied Science opened in 1836, making UVA the first comprehensive university to open an engineering school. Unlike the majority of Southern colleges, the university was kept open throughout the Civil War, despite its state seeing more bloodshed than any other and the near 100%
conscription of the
American South. After
Jubal Early's total loss at the
Battle of Waynesboro, Charlottesville was willingly surrendered to Union forces to avoid mass bloodshed, and UVA faculty convinced
George Armstrong Custer to preserve Jefferson's university. Although
Union troops camped on the Lawn and damaged many of the Pavilions, Custer's men left four days later without bloodshed and the university was able to return to its educational mission. However, an extremely high number of officers of both Confederacy and Union were alumni. UVA produced 1,481 officers in the
Confederate Army alone, including four major-generals, twenty-one brigadier-generals, and sixty-seven colonels from ten different states. During this period, the University of Virginia remained unique in that it had no president and mandated no
core curriculum from its students, who often studied in and took degrees from more than one school.
Edwin Alderman, who had only recently moved from his post as president of
UNC-Chapel Hill since 1896 to become president of
Tulane University in 1900, accepted an offer as president of the University of Virginia in 1904. His appointment was not without controversy, and national media such as
Popular Science lamented the end of one of the things that made UVA unique among universities. Alderman stayed 27 years, and became known as a prolific fund-raiser, a well-known orator, and a close adviser to U.S. president and UVA alumnus
Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps his greatest ambition was the funding and construction of a library on a scale of millions of books, much larger than the Rotunda could bear. Delayed by the
Great Depression, Alderman Library was named in his honor in 1938. Alderman, who seven years earlier had died in office en route to giving a public speech at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, is still the longest-tenured president of the university. In 1904, UVA became the first university south of Washington, D.C. to be elected to the
Association of American Universities. After a gift by
Andrew Carnegie in 1909 the University of Virginia was organized into twenty-six departments across six schools including the
Andrew Carnegie School of Engineering, the
James Madison School of Law, the
James Monroe School of International Law, the
James Wilson School of Political Economy, the
Edgar Allan Poe School of English and the
Walter Reed School of Pathology. In 1944,
Mary Washington College in
Fredericksburg, Virginia, became the Women's Undergraduate Arts and Sciences Division of the University of Virginia. With this branch campus in Fredericksburg exclusively for women, UVA maintained its main campus in Charlottesville as near-exclusively for men, until a civil rights lawsuit in the 1960s forced it to commingle the sexes. In 1970, the Charlottesville campus became fully co-educational, and in 1972 Mary Washington became an independent state university. Following his successful lawsuit, a handful of black graduate and professional students were admitted during the 1950s, though no black undergraduates were admitted until 1955, and UVA did not fully integrate until the 1960s.
21st century speaking with U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry in front of
the Rotunda in February 2013 Due to a continual decline in state funding for the university, today only 6 percent of its budget comes from the Commonwealth of Virginia. The university welcomed
Teresa A. Sullivan as its first female president in 2010. Just two years later its first woman rector,
Helen Dragas, engineered a forced-resignation to remove President Sullivan from office. The attempted ouster elicited a faculty Senate vote of no confidence in Rector Dragas, and demands from student government for an explanation. In the face of mounting pressure including alumni threats to cease contributions, and a mandate from then-Governor
Robert McDonnell to resolve the issue or face removal of the entire Board of Visitors, the board unanimously reinstated President Sullivan. In 2013 and 2014, the board passed new bylaws that made it harder to remove a president and possible to remove a rector. In November 2014, the university suspended fraternity and sorority functions pending investigation of
an article by
Rolling Stone concerning an alleged rape story, which was later determined to be a
hoax after the story was confirmed to be false through investigation by
The Washington Post. The university nonetheless instituted new rules banning "pre-mixed drinks, punches or any other common source of alcohol" such as beer kegs and requiring "sober and lucid" fraternity members to monitor all parties. In April 2015,
Rolling Stone fully retracted the article after the
Columbia School of Journalism released a scathing and discrediting report on the "anatomy of a journalistic failure" by its author. Even before release of the Columbia University report, the
Rolling Stone story was named the "Error of the Year" by the
Poynter Institute. The UVA chapter of
Phi Kappa Psi settled a defamation suit against
Rolling Stone and received $1.65 million. In August 2017, the night before the infamous
Unite the Right rally, a group of non-student and mostly non-Virginian
white nationalists marched on the university's
Lawn bearing torches and chanting
antisemitic and
Nazi slogans after the city of
Charlottesville decided to remove all remaining
Confederate statues from the city including one depicting
Robert E. Lee. They were met by student counter-protesters near the statue of
Thomas Jefferson in front of the Rotunda. Unite the Right marchers attacked students, staff and faculty with torches, mace spray, and lighter fluid, causing significant injury. The next day, August 12, the Unite the Right Rally met in downtown Charlottesville in a rally organized in part by UVA alumnus Jason Kessler. President Sullivan discouraged faculty, staff and students from counter-protesting the rally. Many ignored her, including several hit by the car driven by James Alex Fields Jr, a rally participant.
James E. Ryan, a graduate of the
University of Virginia School of Law, became the university's ninth president in August 2018. His first act upon his inauguration was to announce that in-state undergraduates from families making less than $80,000 per year would receive full scholarships covering tuition, and those from families making under $30,000 would also receive free room and board. Ryan was previously dean of the
Harvard School of Education. On the night of November 13, 2022, three students were killed and two others injured in
a shooting on a
charter bus that was returning to the campus from a play for a class trip in
Washington, D.C. All three fatalities were current members of the
Virginia Cavaliers football team and the alleged shooter was briefly a member of the team during the 2018 season. In response to increasing pro-Palestinian sentiment within college communities across the US, a group of protestors, which included UVA students, created a peaceful
encampment near the Rotunda in May 2024. The University reportedly responded by creating a policy prohibiting camps and tents on Grounds after the encampment started, and using this as grounds to bring in local police. Police attacked and pepper sprayed the protesters, and they were consequently arrested In 2025, the
United States Department of Justice called for President
Ryan to resign, citing university-wide efforts to stall and misrepresent the dismantling of the University's diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Ryan announced his resignation on June 27, 2025. In October 2025, the university made a deal with the
Trump administration, agreeing to "not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in its university programming, admissions, hiring or other activities". On November 12, 2025,
Virginia governor-elect
Abigail Spanberger asked the University’s board of visitors to pause its search for a new president until she takes office, and could appoint members to the board. Governor
Glenn Youngkin and conservative alumni criticized the move as political interference. == Grounds ==