On 2 November 1822 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Cooper on the sectarianism and intolerance that pervaded the ranks of higher education. "The atmosphere of our country is unquestionably charged with a threatening cloud of fanaticism, lighter in some parts, denser in others, but too heavy in all." Jefferson hoped that despite the charged climate of the- Second Great Awakening, a period of religious evangelism that swept the country from the 1790s through the ,1820s, the spread of new knowledge in science, biology, and technology might lessen the hypersectarianism that limited academic freedom: "The diffusion of instruction, to which there is now growing attention, will be the remote remedy to this fever of fanaticism." Jefferson proposed a plan that encouraged the various religious sects to establish, each for themselves, "a professorship of their own tenets." In the end he...