Talk:Vincennes University

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[edit] Private vs public

• What is not clear to me in the history of Vincennes University is whether the Jefferson Academy was a private institution or a public one. Any help (with web or printed references) would be helpful.
• Another topic that is not clear to me is: what was the mission of Jefferson Academy? With the name academy, I suspect that its mission included secondary education, but then again there could just be a modern versus antiquated difference in the use of the term academy. Any help (with web or printed references) would be helpful.
• Another topic that has some degree of ambiguity is the exact step-by-step relationship between Jefferson Academy, Vincennes University, and Territorial University (the public land-grant university founded by the Territory of Indiana, which might be separate from VU or might be VU itself). I suspect that the history description that I wrote up in this article is telling only a portion of the story. What might help is if anyone has access to the Trustees of VU v State of Indiana legal case's papers...help please from someone in the know. What I suspect is that VU existed in parallel for a brief period of time with Territorial University before acquiring its assets through a merger that was prompted by the State of Indiana seeking to abandon its relationship with the Territory of Indiana's public university, as perhaps the State of Indiana wanted to fund only one public unversity in Bloomington and not carry the territorial university forward at all. VU perhaps interpreted that one of its assets was the land-grant status, whereas the State of Indiana perhaps thought that they were transferring ownership of only the defunct territorial university's real estate omitting the land-grant legal status. There is much room for clarification on these finer points that I broadbrushed as accurately as I could in the article as it now stands without access to the blow-by-blow historical documents as seminal references. Optikos 20:14, 5 February 2006 (UTC)