The college itself was no less an attraction than the town. Built originally on the plans of Christopher Wren, it had unfortunately been remodeled after a fire, "a rude, misshapen pile, which but it had a roof would be taken for a brick-kiln", wrote Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia." Such as it was, however, with the Capitol, of much better style, it was the first large building and monument the young man had ever seen and he probably admired it at the time as much as most Virginians did.
It was by no means a university, not even a real college. Like most institutions of learning in the colonies, it had been established "to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary for ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of the Almighty."
The lack of preparation of the students, the fact that the sons of the wealthiest were sent to England to finish their education, perhaps also an aristocratic scorn for specialized and intensive learning among the gentry of Virginia, all had contributed to keep down the standards of the institution. Much to his disgust, Jefferson found
... that the admission of the learners of Latin and Greek had filled the college with children. This rendering it disagreeable and degrading to young gentlemen, already prepared for entering on the sciences, they were discouraged from resorting to it, and thus the schools for mathematics and moral philosophy, which might have been of some service, became of very little. The revenues, too, were exhausted in accommodating those who came only to acquire the rudiments of the sciences.[5]
Thus the problem of caring for the many, the danger of keeping together in college the prepared and the unprepared students, which is still with us, existed already in America one hundred and fifty years ago. Evidently Jefferson considered himself as one of those young gentlemen who were prepared for entering upon the study of the sciences; he was certainly more mature for his years than most of his fellow students and looked down upon them as well, we may surmise, as upon the teachers themselves. On the other hand, the town offered many temptations and he probably yielded to some of them. He was often thrown into the society of horse-racers, card-players, fox-hunters, and at the end of his first year in college it appeared to him that he had spent more than his share of the income of the estate. He therefore wrote to his guardian to charge his expenses to his share of the property: "No," Colonel Walker is reported to have said,--"if you have sowed your wild oats thus, the estate may well afford to pay the bill."