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Liberal Education Imperiled3 3 1tion. It is the most important thing common to all men. Religious force andcoercion have failed and ever will. In order for a citizenry to respect the lawsof nature, and reason’s ability to know, Jefferson wrote, the university neededto be “broad and liberal.” 55 In his efforts to establish the University of Virginia,Jefferson noted to Thomas Cooper that he hoped sectarian criticismswould subside, and thought that college education should be the “bulwarkof the human mind.” 56 Jefferson’s aim in the creation of the University ofVirginia was to give fair play to the cultivation of reason through a nonsectarianeducation, albeit one in which religion was not excluded from themarketplace of ideas.American colleges were to cultivate a natural aristocracy in political rule,as well as lead the citizens to virtue and enlightenment. James Madison concurredwith Jefferson, believing that higher education should partake ofthe true doctrines of liberty, as exemplified in our Political System,[and] should be inculcated on those who are to sustain and mayadminister it. …Sidney & Locke are admirably calculated to impresson young minds the right of Nations to establish their own Governments,and to inspire a love of free ones. 57Madison would go further, writing that the university was the “Temple”through which the liberty of the Union would be secured. 58 The sacred textsof the republic were not the works of theology, but works of philosophy. It isevident that, for Madison and Jefferson at least, a liberal education includedphilosophy, or the love of wisdom. Still, Madison would write to Jeffersonthat “after all, the most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions intothe school of politics, will be an able and orthodox professor, whose courseof instruction will be an example to his successors, and may carry with ita sanction from the visitors.” 59 So that it might appear that even Madison’sopposition to educational indoctrination had its limits. However, nothing55Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestly, 18 January 1800, in Writings, 1070.56Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 14 August 1820, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert ElleryBergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 15:269. We should note thatJefferson believed the university would be a bulwark for the mind, as opposed to the soul, in the senseof salvation. See also Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 380; Marsden, Soul of the American University,68.57Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825, in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the PoliticalThought of James Madison, ed. Marvin Meyers (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1981), 349.58Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 February 1825, in James Madison, Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove(New York: Library of America, 1999), 810.59Madison to Jefferson, 8 February 1825, in Mind of the Founder, 350.