Objectives
Five commitments. Each one is a category in our archive, so the link at the end of every section is a live list of everything we have published on it — not a snapshot that goes stale.
Intellectual diversity
A university is a place where competing accounts of the world are argued in front of students who are learning how to judge them. That requires people on Grounds who actually disagree with each other.
UVA now ranks among the most ideologically lopsided public universities in the country. A 2026 FIRE study found students identifying as liberal rather than conservative by better than five to one. This is not a complaint about anyone’s politics. It is an observation that a faculty and student body drawn from one half of the argument cannot teach the argument.
In every country where man is free to think and to speak, differences of opinion will arise from difference of perception, and the imperfection of reason. But these differences, when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but as passing clouds overshadowing our land transiently, and leaving our horizon more bright and serene.
Thomas Jefferson
Free expression
Speech policy is only tested under pressure — when a speaker arrives who half the audience dislikes, when a protest forms, when a student says something careless. UVA has a free expression statement. What matters is what happens the week it becomes inconvenient.
We report on those weeks: who was invited and disinvited, who was shouted down, what the University said at the time, and what it did afterwards.
Accountability
UVA is a public institution spending public money, and it is governed by a board appointed by the Governor of Virginia. Both facts create obligations that are easy to let slide.
Tuition rises, budgets are approved without recorded questions, decisions of consequence are made in closed session, and records requests are answered late or not at all. We read the filings, file the requests, and publish the results — including the ones where the University’s answer was fifty pages of white space.
Its object should be defined only generally, for teaching the useful branches of science; leaving the particulars to the direction of the day.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson’s legacy
When Jefferson laid out the Grounds he was making an argument in brick about what a university is: an academical village, where learning happens between the buildings as much as inside them. The Lawn is a National Historic Landmark District and one of only twenty-six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States.
How the University maintains it, what it permits to be displayed on it, and how it describes the man who designed it are not decorative questions. They are the institution telling you what it thinks it inherited.
The whole of these arranged around an open square of grass and trees would make it, what it should be in fact, an academical village, instead of a large and common den of noise, of filth, and of fetid air.
Thomas Jefferson
Honor
The Honor System is student-run, nearly two centuries old, and the most distinctive thing about a UVA education. It has also been rewritten, worked around, and in places quietly abandoned — by students who will not report each other, by faculty who have stopped bringing cases and now simply redesign their exams, and by an administration that has at times allowed it to be used against the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
We follow what is left of it, and we publish what students, parents, and faculty tell us.
In estimating every man’s value, either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and learning and talents are only the second. The first is always that sort of integrity which makes a man act in the dark as if it was in the open blaze of day.
Thomas Jefferson