BUZZ
An administrator at the University of Virginia, founded by President Thomas Jefferson, took some of his time at the podium during the school’s recent commencement ceremony to criticize the founding father and second president of the United States.
Kenyon Bonner, UVA’s vice president and chief student affairs officer, said Jefferson’s “ethically corrosive claims about human capacity reflected his ignorance and his hubris,” adding “ignorance precedes injustice.”
The moment was recorded and posted on X by Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, who wrote that it was “a pretty sweeping charge to make from the graduation stage at Jefferson’s university, especially when Jefferson’s actual record is more complicated than the flattened campus script allows.”
Smith continued: “By the standards of his era, Jefferson showed more intellectual openness than many of his contemporaries. UVA should be the last place beating him with the hammer of presentism. The irony is that Bonner eventually admits the obvious. Jefferson’s blueprint for an educated democracy was ‘compelling, transcendent, and transformational.'”
The Jefferson Council, a group of UVA alumni concerned with the progressive-left slant of the school, published a statement Monday condemning the incident.
“His remarks were incongruous, unseemly, and incorrect – and perhaps more than anything, they were an example of psychological projection,” the council wrote. “To characterize Mr. Jefferson as uniquely marked by ‘ignorance and hubris’ says less about Jefferson than it does about the speaker.”
“It requires extraordinary hubris and profound ignorance to dismiss one of the greatest minds in the history of Western civilization as a person materially enveloped by those traits,” the group added.
“Reducing Mr. Jefferson to such a caricature reflects an unfathomable lack of historical understanding and is nothing less than flawed ideological certainty masquerading as moral clarity.”
As The College Fix has previously reported, UVA is no stranger to criticizing President Jefferson.
In 2022, its student newspaper editors demanded the removal of all memorial references to Jefferson. In 2017, a group of students demanded a statue in his honor on campus be “contextualized” by adding a plaque to it that denotes his link to “white supremacy, colonization and slavery.”
In 2020, students and activists hosted a community healing event after officials refused to remove the Jefferson statue on campus.
MORE: Jefferson monument at UVA vandalized with paint
