List of presidents of the University of Virginia

In Thomas Jefferson's original plan the faculty, counseled by a Board of Visitors, governed the university. By the turn of the century, the school had grown larger and more complex, and the Visitors saw the need to appoint a president. When Woodrow Wilson, a University of Virginia law graduate yet to be president, declined the offer, they turned to Edwin Anderson Alderman, well known as an innovative educator in the South and a great orator across the nation. Alderman was inaugurated on Founder's Day, April 13, 1905. Within a year, Alderman had seen to the opening of a school of education at the university.^{[citation needed]}

Prior to 1904, the administrative head of the University of Virginia was the chairman of the faculty. According to the 1900 publication of The University of Virginia: Glimpses of its past and present, "The University of Virginia is an ideal community. It has been described as a small republic, finding in itself all that is necessary in the way of government and the pursuit of happiness. It is democratic as far as its government goes, since the powers of control are distributed as far as possible. There is no president, but there is a chairman of the faculty who stands in somewhat the relation of other college presidents to the responsibilities of control and direction. He is not as nearly absolute as a college president. The faculty is his cabinet, and the faculty committees distribute the administration in a rather general way."^[1]: 9