Old Virginia Nurtures Gentry Before Scholars Jefferson's Child Turns Out Wealthy, Wild, and Wooly Grads

Whether they have affected ruffles or roadsters, gentlemen have always been the pride of the picturesque college town of Charlottesville in Albermarle County, Virginia. The University glories in its distinguished founder and first rector, Thomas Jefferson, and the names of Presidents Madison and Munroe appear on the records as "visitors," 1819 equivalent of trustees. The wealthiest state university per capita in the nation, it was recently termed a collection of "rich young wastrels" by Time Magazine. More kind and accurate many years earlier was the description of the undergraduate product by Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard at the inauguration of the first president of Virginita in 1905: "That they should be gentlemen before scholars . . . this truth has never been forgotten here."

This character of the sons of Virginia, which Professor Coolidge cited at the installation of Edwin A. Alderman, has been molded by battle and distilled by bottle. At the outbreak of what is referred to as "the late unpleasantness between the states," 9,000 students had matriculated at the colonnades of the Jefferson rotunda. Of these 2,481, almost 30 percent, fell at Chancellorsville and the Wilderness, at Shiloh and Gettysburg, and many are buried within the famed serpentine brick walls of the 500-acre campus.

Student Shoots Professor

History of another kind was also written in blood on the night of November 12, 1840. In one of the quaint alcoholic college traditions known as the "Calathump," students customarily gave vent to their opinions of instructors whose "walk and conversation" were unpalatable. One Professor J. A. G. Davis, chairman of the faculty and apparently rather unloved, was instantly shot by a marauding masked student whom he sought to identify. The "calathump" institution along with the "dyke," a lynch-party directed at students overly "addicted to calico" or Southern Womanhood, fell into gradual disuse in 1856. Ancestral example, however, has not been lost to later generations.

Charlottesville firemen no longer answer the alarm at the University; they have been burnt by the student body once too often. Two years ago the fire department allied with the municipal police fought a pitched battle with the Virginia boys and the state troopers. Routed at the end, the firefighters lost their clothing and trucks to a rioting band of fraternity men after responding to a false signal. Hook and ladder in nearby Crozet, more intrepid than the Charlottesville smoke eaters, can still be summoned in an emergency.

Honor, expressed in a college-wide policy on examinations, is the cornerstone of the Virginia gentlemen's code. No proctors have been required at Virginia finals since Judge Henry St. George Tucker of the law school proposed the pledge now submitted to all exam-takers beginning: "I do hereby certify that I have derived no assistance during the time of this examination from any source whatever." Today without a signature to this document a paper is automatically failed.

Discipline is self imposed by a large Student Council which includes membership from all the graduate schools. The formal right of this body to expel a student is rarely tested, but delinquents who have suffered its condemnation have frequently just dropped out of sight.

Athletics have advanced to a far more important position from the days of M. D' Alfonce in 1852, a mustachioed Gaul who led marching and deep breathing en-masse until 1862. One of the last in the South to openly adopt the system, Virginia began the subsidization of athletic talent two years ago.

University Gets New President

Twenty-two fraternities form an oligarchy among an aristocracy, embracing one seventh of a total University population of approximately 7,000. Around them is now coalescing an incipient campus revolution. After a quarter of a century of laissez-faire administration, John L. Newcomb, president for a quarter of a century, relinquished his chair this week to Colgate Darden, former governor of the state and chancellor of William and Mary. Darden is an outspoken advocate of limiting the fraternities, which currently enjoy free flowing liquor and a similar interpretation of parietal rules. There are no bars in Charlottesville, so that liquor stores for the alumni "homecoming" weekend of the Harvard football game have been eached since last spring.

The problem of the South is still not a problem in the educational temple of Virginia. In the written recollections of one graduate of 1900 is a kind word for janitor Henry Martin-"his manner is urbane and dignified and his probity perfect-in short he is a fine old colored gentleman."

Virginia's influence has diffused through out the South and the nation in letters, on the bench, in the cloth, in medicine, the army and navy, and most famously in public office. Admiral William F. Halsey and Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., belong to the same alumni association which nominally includes Pee and one Nathaniel R. Clanton of Augusta, Ga., black sheep of his class, who was killed on the barri cades of the Paris Commune of 1872.