About

The Jefferson Council was formed in 2020 by University of Virginia alumni who had run out of patience.

Two things happened that year. A University task force published a report calling for a billion-dollar overhaul of UVA in the name of equity. And a student living on the Lawn — the Jeffersonian heart of the University, a UNESCO World Heritage site — hung a sign on their door reading F--- UVA, which the administration declined to remove.

Neither event, on its own, would have started an organisation. Together they suggested something more troubling: that the people running the University had stopped being able to say what it was for.

The first year

We began as volunteers with no staff and no budget. Mostly we listened. We brought speakers to Grounds who would not otherwise have been invited, we talked to students and faculty who had concluded that saying certain things out loud carried a professional cost, and we started writing down what we were told.

That documenting habit turned out to be the thing. It is now the core of what we do.

What we are now

The Council reaches more than sixteen thousand UVA alumni and supporters — parents, donors, students, and faculty among them. We publish original reporting drawn from public records, budget documents, filings, and the University’s own materials. We file Freedom of Information Act requests and publish what comes back, including the parts that come back blank. We prepare research briefs for the Board of Visitors and for members of the General Assembly. We host events on Grounds.

We are not neutral, and we do not pretend to be. We think a university that hires, teaches, and admits from within a single point of view has stopped doing the thing a university exists to do. We say so.

But being unneutral is not the same as being unreliable. Everything we publish is sourced, and the sources are on the site. Where we get something wrong, we correct it in public. Where a document contradicts us, we publish the document.

What we want

Not a different orthodoxy. A university where competing ideas can be argued in the open, where money is accounted for, where the Honor System means something, and where the Lawn is treated as what it is.

Those commitments are set out in more detail on the objectives page, and every one of them is attached to reporting you can read.

How we are funded

The Jefferson Council is a 501(c)(3) organisation supported by individual donations from alumni and friends of the University. We accept no funding from UVA and none from the Commonwealth.