
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 1, 1995                   TAG: 9503010027
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BOB BENOIT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LEARNING FOOTBALL AT JEFFERSON'S KNEE

GEOFF SEAMANS' Feb. 5 column, "The un-Jeffersonian governor of Virginia,'' was excellent. However, Seamans says he can't buy the ``official legend ... that Allen, while a history major at the University of Virginia, drank deep at the fount of Jefferson's minimal-government wisdom.'' I disagree. Allen drank too deep.

If Allen had skipped class more often during his undergraduate days at UVa, he might have missed the revisionist philosophy of modern U.S. history taught by faculty whose battle cry is ``take the truth, turn it 180 degrees, and gain tenure.'' Allen has applied this academic game to politics with a vengeance. He knows one of Charlottesville's best-kept revisionist secrets: Jefferson wasn't trying to found a university. Rather, he wanted to build a state-of-the-architecture prison. According to this convoluted view of history, somehow the prison ward was converted by an embarrassing typographical error to ``The Lawn.''

Only a clever politician such as Allen could turn a first-rank university into a prison by using scholars' intellectual tools to serve his narrow political ends. Allen learned a long time ago that the Statue of Liberty play used in football is a fine piece of athletic deception, and it can be applied to any end, including getting Jefferson to endorse the Allen political agenda.

In accordance with the domino theory, all state colleges will be affected by Allen's proposals. Virginia Tech will become the lean, mean, flagship state university with a single curriculum entitled ``Quarrying Hokie Stone.'' The unlimited limestone deposits in Blacksburg will provide a bountiful stone supply to construct more prisons in Charlottesville. The prison expansion will allow Tech to grow to a university of 100,000 students, and its tuition will be the lowest in the country. Every Hokie graduate will have a guaranteed job, and the 100 surviving faculty will finally have a respectable 80-hour-a-week teaching load.

Allen will keep the legislature in check by holding a two-day, unpaid session at the annual inside-the-walls football contest between the Hokie Rock Cutters and the Stoned Wahoo Inmates. Any Democrats left in the legislature will make official state animal sounds at half time.

The Virginia Military Institute/Mary Baldwin will continue its proud leadership tradition by training guards for the Charlottesville prison. Western Virginia Community College will teach a course titled ``How to get a job on the Norfolk Southern railroad moving stone from Blacksburg to Charlottesville.'' Radford University's revived International College will help manage Charlottesville's 10 million international-inmate population.

Knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and the craps game unfolding in Richmond may cause historians to forget Gen. Grant's attack on that city. Allen's fighting strategy isn't borrowed from the play book of his illustrious father. It looks more like the military blueprint of Gen. Sherman's march through Georgia.

How will revisionist historians describe the battle between the constructive tradition of Gov. Mills Godwin and the destructive agenda of Allen? Don't sell short on Hokie stone futures.

Bob Benoit, of Blacksburg, is associate professor in the Biology Dept. at Virginia Tech.

by CNB