Attention, book lovers, bargain hunters, and history buffs! Don’t miss the great deals at the University of Virginia Press Warehouse Sale. Thousands of first-quality books in Virginiana, history, literature, African American studies, founding fathers, the Civil War, and more will be on sale. Hours are Friday, September 27, from 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, September 28, from 10 am to 2 pm at the Press Warehouse, 500 Edgemont Road, three blocks west of McCormick and Alderman (driveway located off McCormick Road). For more information, please email stephanie.lovegrove@virginia.edu or call 434-924-6070.

The University of Virginia is one of the nation’s top institutions of higher learning. Establishing credibility was a process, however, not a given—even with Thomas Jefferson as its founder. UVa went through very real growing pains, as Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos make clear in their new book Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America. In the following piece, coathor Carlos Santos takes on an issue at the center of higher learning—tuition—and illustrates how Edgar Allan Poe’s folks didn’t have it any better than your folks…

Much has changed at the University of Virginia in the past 185 years, but not tuition shock—that feeling of parental despair and pain over the cost of a college education.  UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan recently released some sticker-shock news. She announced changes to the nationally recognized AccessUVa financial-aid program, reverting back to loans versus outright grants. The adjustments will be phased in over a four-year period by class, beginning with the 2014-15 academic year. Sullivan says that “once fully implemented, this new approach will help the University moderate escalating program costs by about $6 million per year.”  But it won’t moderate parental costs at all, of course.

Two centuries ago, tuition shock also struck Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father. Poe arrived at UVa in 1826. He traveled 60 miles from Richmond by horseback over rough roads and ragged paths to Charlottesville, a village of about 9,000 white people and 11,500 black slaves. The town was a bustling epicenter of an otherwise sleepy frontier. The scream of sawmills split the air filled with the pungent smell of smoke, distilleries and tanneries. Just outside the town was the state’s new university erected in “a poor old turned out field.”

Poe had traveled to the backwater town to get an education at the behest of his foster father, John Allan, who saw educating his foster son as a boost up the social ladder for himself. But Allan was tight with his money and he was stunned by the cost of tuition: $50 for the first class, $60 for two, $75 for three. Most students took three classes. Allan allowed Poe, despite his foster’s son’s pleading, to take only two.

I think it’s safe to say that Allan, a self-made man, suffered tuition shock at the idea of paying $50—the equivalent of $1,000 today—for a single class.

The current tuition rate tallies in at about $1,000 per class too by the way. But at least a student in Jefferson’s time could get a bargain by taking two or three classes. Paying $75 for three classes would amount to only about $1,500 now or $500 per class—a steal by modern standards.

Tuition follows that famous if anonymous quote about the law of inflation: whatever goes up will go up some more. Sullivan, following that law, explains: “Since AccessUVa’s launch in 2004-05, institutional costs have increased from $11.5 million to more than $40 million. Most of this money comes from tuition. Today, a third of our students qualify for aid, compared with a fourth when the program started. We have known for some time that these rising costs were not sustainable, and the Board asked the administration in 2011 to evaluate the program.”

If tuition pain has not changed, everything else at the school has, and for the better.UVa’s first day of school was held in March of 1825. The 125 students who journeyed to Charlottesville by horse or carriage were all male, all white, came mostly from Virginia and for the most part were the rich and privileged sons of plantation owners.The only African Americans at the school were slaves, euphemistically known as servants, who cleaned students’ boots and bedding and served their meals. Women in the precincts were either the wives of professors or were prostitutes sneaking into Lawn rooms to entertain students.

The Lawn itself was rough, a terraced court of muddy red clay where pigs and dogs and slave children roamed unfettered. The smell of chimney smoke and latrines wafted through the air. Open fields and woods surrounded the university. Many of the students, who carried hair-trigger tempers to protect their upper class sense of honor, were prone to violence – to fighting, biting, stabbing, and dueling either with fellow students or townies. The student violence bolstered critics of Jefferson’s university who considered the university godless and a playground for the rich. Mr. Jefferson’s university – and all the revolutionary changes it brought to American higher education—was almost shuttered by the General Assembly in its early, wild years.

UVa is now one of the top “public Ivies” and the state’s flagship university. Over half of the almost 16,000 undergraduates who descended on Charlottesville on this fall to begin school are women, while about one-third hail from outside Virginia. African Americans make up 9.4 percent of the student body, Asians 11 percent, while Hispanic/Latino students account for 4.5 percent. Many of the students are attending the school based on their academic merit. Most were in the top 10 percent of their high school class. U.Va, with a total enrollment of 21,000—including graduate, law and medical students—will become a boisterous roil of diverse youth on that first day of school.

What would Jefferson—a futurist, a despiser of tradition for its own sake, but a man stuck in his own time and a slave owner—think walking the Lawn today?

Carlos Santos is the co-author, with Rex Bowman, of the just published Rot, Riot and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America.

Hassan Rouhani’s surprise landslide victory in Iran’s elections astounded Iranians, Americans, and much of the world. In his victory speech, he claimed he would travel the road to “moderation.” What does this mean? Is he a “mianeh ro” or “e’tedal,” meaning middle of the road or just man, or alternatively, is he simply against extremism? If so, is he a “centrist” and “pragmatist,” responding flexibly to different situations, or is he, as he has been called, “the diplomatic sheikh”?

To put it differently, is he a follower of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who, during his presidency in 1989-1997, sought little conflict with the West and catered to the governments in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia? Or is Rouhani remembering Rafsanjani for making room for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to ascend to the role of the Supreme Leader of Iran? At the time, I called Rafsanjani and Khamenei the riders of a “docharkheh-e donafari,” that is, riding a bicycle made for two.

Alternatively, is Rouhani trying to follow Mohammad Khatami, who created room for détente with the world in 1997-2005, made the world a safer place for the people of Iran by giving them a modicum of individual liberty and freedom of speech, and committed himself to a “dialogue among civilizations” throughout the world?

There is little doubt that the people who supported Rafsanjani and Khatami cast their vote massively in favor of Rouhani. The confrontational policies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005-2013 damaged the people of Iran. He claimed at the outset that “America needs us,” not the other way around. Rouhani criticized Ahmadinejad for his “careless, uncalculated and unstudied remarks,” such as his threat to wipe Israel off the map and his denial of the Holocaust. He indirectly blamed the influence of extremists and radicals on the poor relationship between Iran and major powers of the world.

Finally, what has he said about “moderation”? In a series of speeches, he has tried to explain what he means by this term, mentioned in the New York Times only in one paragraph on June 30. This neglect in the Times and elsewhere in the Western press is unfortunate, since Rouhani has spelled out what he means: “Moderation in foreign policy means neither submission nor hostility, neither passiveness nor confrontation. Moderation is active and constructive interaction with the world.”

Since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iranian presidents have pursued an overall aspirational paradigm that I call “spiritual pragmatism,” embodying two conflicting elements. President Rouhani has elaborated. He says, “Moderation covers a wide spectrum. It begins with belief and convictions and leads to norms, behavior and action. It begins with economic and political affairs and leads to social and cultural issues.”

Rouhani’s views exemplify spiritual pragmatism, which begins with belief and convictions, spirituality, and leads to norms, behavior, and action, pragmatism. But they also reflect a contradiction that has not yet been resolved in Iran’s foreign policy. At the time of the adoption of the Iranian Constitution, there was tension over whether the rights of the people would be given the greatest priority or the rights of the faqih, and this conflict persists in Rouhani’s statements.

By covering decades of Iranian foreign policy decisions, my new book investigates what I call Independence without Freedom: Iran’s Foreign Policy. I try to place Iran’s foreign policy in the context of what I call “diplomatic culture,” defined as those values, norms, mores, institutions, modes of thinking, and ways of acting that have developed over centuries, have survived change, and continue to shape Iran’s foreign policy making to date. Rouhani might aspire to combine spirituality and pragmatism, but like his predecessors, he will be entangled in the endemic, unresolved problem of choosing between the right of the people and the right of the faqih.

R.K. Ramazani is Edward R. Stettinius Professor Emeritus of Government and Foreign Affairs. His forthcoming book is Independence without Freedom: Iran’s Foreign Policy.

Developed in collaboration with Documents Compass, a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, People of the Founding Era provides biographical information for thousands of individuals active during a crucial period in American history. Beginning with 12,000 but eventually expanding to over 60,000 people born between 1713 and 1815, the subjects include members of many of the most important families of the era, as well as individuals—such as artisans, merchants, slaves, and Native Americans—whose lives are not typically documented in historical archives.

Finding information on such a large population, and covering such a broad area of history, would have once required access to hundreds of volumes of historic documents. People of the Founding Era makes that information immediately accessible and offers entirely new ways of discovering connections between individuals.

“From family history to teaching and scholarly research, The People of the Founding Era is a new kind of digital tool,” said Mark H. Saunders, Interim Director of the UVa Press. “Drawing on decades of documentary editing and the methodologies of prosopography, married with digital humanities, this resource not only provides biographical information; it assembles and visualizes that information in exciting new ways.”

An innovative “faceted browsing” approach allows users to search across the resource or to access populations by groupings such as place, gender, occupation, or enslavement. All entries include some biographical data, and many have a complete profile—full name, birth date, place of birth, death date, place of death, occupation, gender, and nationality. The relationships between subjects, including kinship, are driven by structured tagging and presented within each entry. Information in many of these entries has been extracted directly from the Papers projects in Rotunda’s American Founding Era collection: in these cases, People of the Founding Era links back to the original references within their respective editions, so users may explore more fully the context in which the individual was originally documented.

Historians, genealogists, and all students of American history will find in the People of the Founding Era the most authoritative biographical dictionary of the period, and more.

Rotunda publications are produced by staff members of the University of Virginia Press.  For more information on Rotunda or UVa Press, please contact Emily Grandstaff at 434-982-2932 / egrandstaff@virginia.edu. Institutions or individuals interested in purchasing, please contact Jason Coleman at 434-924-1450/jcoleman@virginia.edu