More college campuses!

Something Very Great and Very New
Pg. 152
"But what Jefferson wanted was indeed 'something very great and very new': a university that would be wholly secular and utterly independent of any religious institution. An outpost of the Enlightenment, this university would be 'so broad, so liberal, and modern' he told Joseph Priestly".

It's understandable why Jefferson would call his unaffiliated college "new" and "liberal". This was a time where religion still had a very strong hold on the way society ran as a whole. To have a highly regarded institution (higher education was a BIG deal) that wasn't lining up with what they considered to be the highest institution of all (God) must have been completely absurd, I find it interesting that Jefferson, from what is presented in this article, was able to gain a lot of support of the idea. The fact that his earlier attempt failed makes me wonder if it's secularism had anything to do with how people's opinion of the school was formed.Even today it's somewhat unusual to find a college (with the exception of public schools) that doesn't have a religious affiliation. For the most part, they do.

As Jefferson was sketching and planning his campus and college I wonder if he thought about the concepts described in "Campus: An American Planning Tradition". Did he think about the kinds of characteristics St. Olaf embraces? And lastly, I couldn't help to wonder, why didn't we read this when we were talking about landscapes?