I think that the fact that the founders of the University elected to put the University of Virginia in the county that had the biggest white population speaks volumes about the men who started our great University and the beliefs that the Founders had. This passage reveals that the Founders wanted a place with a big white population in order to attract rich plantation owner's sons, because those are the kinds of people they wanted attending their University. However now in 2017, that isn't the case, no longer does UVA just attract the rich, white people as the Founders wanted it too when they first started the institution. UVA now is home to a student body rich in diversity and culture and I think that speaks volumes about how far this institution has come. But I would also like to point out, there is still progress that this institution needs to make and steps that must be taken in order to truly make our school the most equal place it can be. -Emily McClung

This passage foreshadows that eventually the University will further progress their medicine program but at this time and place do not have the resources to do so because they don't have a hospital in which students can study and gain clinical experience. I think it is very interesting in just 200 years since the beginning of the University how much the medicine program has flourished with the building of the UVA hospital, which is the number one hospital in the state of Virginia. Starting out, the medicine program only taught so many classes and now the medical program is thriving and attracts many different, diverse people from every walk of life. Now, I would like to focus on the second sentence specifically because I find it quite engaging and interesting that the authors of the Rockfish Gap Report thought that a hospital would attract numbers of poor because they would leave their own houses to accept the charities of a hospital. I feel many people, especially older generations, still have this belief that people in poverty take advantage of the charities of a hospital. I for one know that it happens at times because I've seen it happen before firsthand working and shadowing in an emergency room, but honestly it's not that people are taking advantage of the charities of a hospital as they state here, but instead a lot of people in poverty don't have good health, and don't have good healthcare insurance, so their only way to get good health care is by going to an emergency room at a hospital. I for one am a huge advocate for providing good health care for people in poverty because I believe a lot stems from having good healthcare. If you're healthy, you have chance to make your life better by looking for a job and making a living, but if your'e sick, like a lot of people in poverty are it's hard to do that, which is why so many people in poverty flock to places like emergency rooms when they are sick and not healthy. I think that the same thing would have happened had there been a hospital open in the community at the time the University opened. Poor people would have gone to the hospital and accepted the charities of it, but not because they were taking advantage, they would have gone because it's their only means of getting good healthcare. -Emily McClung

I think it is interesting how this sentence describes that the Rockfish Gap Report is "is the genuine fruit in the alliance between church and State" because explicitly in the report the writers state that they won't offer any divinity classes at the University as it is starting out, and I think that this sentence is a contradiction of that statement. The University was built with a library ( the Rotunda) at the heart of it because they wanted to dissociate away from religion, and put knowledge first. So why then, can the Rockfish Gap Report be the genuine fruit in the alliance between church and State, when the vision when opening this University was to put knowledge at the center, and not church and religion? Therefore, in theory if knowledge was supposed to be at the center, I'm interested as to why there is such a glaring contradictory sentence. I think this contradictory shows that the writers of the Rockfish Gap Report had varying beliefs and that came across in the report. To relate, this back to my course that I'm taking called making the Invisible Visible, I think this sentence makes "visible" the invisible varying beliefs of the writers of the Rockfish Gap Report. -Emily McClung