At UVa, in the Wake of a Nightmare, a Reckoning Begins

Salwan Georges, The Washington Post, Getty Images

Last Friday, while the University of Virginia’s orientation for first-year students was underway, three students met in a common area at the edge of campus. They were putting the finishing touches on a series of events intended to contrast sharply with the official introduction to the university: demonstrations, panel discussions, and talks by activists. They called it a “disorientation.”

All summer, the trio had been going back and forth on a messaging app, joining a larger group of student activists organizing a response to a series of white-supremacist events that had been planned to take place here in their university’s home city.

On August 11, the events became part of a national story — and a national conversation on race, hate, and speech. A mob of hundreds of white supremacists bearing tiki torches took to the campus, chanting anti-Semitic slogans in the shadow of the Rotunda, UVa’s most iconic building. Clumped around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, were roughly 20 students and other activists, holding a sign that read “VA Students Act Against White Supremacy.” The white supremacists surrounded them.

That rally, its deadly second act the following day, and a Ku Klux Klan rally that had taken place in Charlottesville in July all happened during summer break when few students were on campus. Now that the rest of the student body had returned, the students who were involved wanted to take the lead in educating their peers about what happened and why.

“There needs to be a conversation about what happened this summer, and there needs to be a conversation about the history of this university,” said Clara Carlson, a senior.

She sat across from Kendall King, a junior who was leaning over a laptop, designing a handout that the students would distribute to freshmen, explaining the racially fraught year in Charlottesville and listing opportunities to get involved in activism on campus. Ms. King pulled up a now-ubiquitous image: students standing beneath the Thomas Jefferson statue, holding the sign. Ms. King was part of the group that night, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to use the photo.

“This photo is centering students,” Ms. King said. Instead she wanted to put the focus on Charlottesville more broadly. One point she wanted to make in the handout was that Charlottesville has a longstanding community of activists who had demonstrated against racism well before the city became a symbol of racial hatred.

“Maybe it’s kind of cheap, but I think that’s what’s on everybody’s minds,” said Hannah Russell-Hunter, a sophomore. “Maybe pull them in,” she said, “and then say, How did we get here?”

Ms. King agreed. The photo made it into the flier.

Much of the UVa community is now engaged in a version of that debate. The events of early August have left students, faculty, and administrators struggling to define and explain what had just happened: How could white supremacists, for a night, seize a campus? Could the university have done more to support its students or even stem a tragedy?

But now, with students moving in and the first classes already underway, UVa has come back to life. And for many, it is time for a reckoning. How much will one traumatic weekend change the university? Many of the students, professors, and officials who are trying to answer that question are doing so by looking to the past.

This past Sunday, as students left a convocation welcoming them to UVa, the student activists passed out copies of the finalized “Disorientation Guide.” While the photo of the counterprotesters made it into the handout, the image on the cover showed the Rotunda with slices between its dome, pediment, and columns. “The Pursuit of Truth,” the cover reads, “Begins Here.”

‘I Felt Very Abandoned’

While students are looking for truth, administrators are seeking answers about what could have gone differently. Across campus, questions have been raised about how a group of torch-wielding white supremacists were able to menace the campus. A common refrain: Why didn’t Teresa A. Sullivan, the president, and other administrators do more to provide security or stop the rally from taking place? (The university’s strategy was to discourage students and professors from attending the event.)

Meanwhile, Ms. Sullivan’s initial statements about the violence on campus and in Charlottesville were met with frustration, in part because she did not identify the marchers — who chanted phrases like “Jews will not replace us” — as neo-Nazis. In one statement, she referred to the students who demonstrated against the torch-carriers as “bystanders;” some professors thought they should have been hailed as heroes instead.

The days after the white-supremacist rally yielded some heated moments between students and administrators. On Sunday, a student-activist group posted a video on Facebook in which a student who said she was at the statue on August 11 confronted Ms. Sullivan.

“I felt very abandoned by the university, and I was just wondering where were you Friday night and why were you not standing with your students?” asked the student, who was identified by the name Caroline.

“I was across the street trying to get police help,” Ms. Sullivan responded, adding that Allen W. Groves, the dean of students, was present during the rally. “We didn’t know they were coming.”

The student challenged the president: How, then, did the students know the marchers were coming?

“Did you tell us?” Ms. Sullivan responded. “Did you tell us they were coming? No, you didn’t. Nobody elevated it to us. Don’t expect us to be reading the alt-right websites. We don’t do that. Now you guys have responsibility here too. Tell us what you know.”

Todd Le, a junior who is involved in two UVa activist groups, Students United and the Living Wage Campaign, said he thought the president seemed to be deflecting accountability and shifting the blame to students.

In an email, Ms. Sullivan wrote that she places no blame on students. “The people to blame in that contretemps,” she said, “are the ones who wielded the torches and pepper spray.”

And last Wednesday a group of eight students who had been on campus during the incident met with Mr. Groves, the dean who had been at the rally, where he was injured by a torch hurled like a spear. Their conversation, which Ms. King recorded and posted online, centered on the events that took place at UVa, but it touched on tensions that are reverberating on many college campuses: where to find the line between protected speech and hate crimes; how to respect people’s identities without policing speech; and how to ensure an inclusive and safe environment for minority students.

Again, the topic turned to the president’s statements — particularly one in which she noted that UVa, as a public institution, had to allow marchers onto the campus to uphold its commitment to free speech. “I think these groups go beyond free speech,” Ms. King said. “This is hate speech and it’s violence.”

She asked why the university didn’t ban such groups on the campus.

“Hate speech for the most part is protected speech under the First Amendment,” said Mr. Groves, who is a lawyer. “Hate crimes are not. Now, we don’t have to be comfortable with that or like it, but the reality is you can say many of the things they were saying and not run afoul of the First Amendment.”

Later in the conversation, students questioned whether the university should adhere so closely to laws that may be seen as putting students at risk.

“The question that I have is, Would it not be worth losing, potentially, in court for the protection of students?” one student asked.

“Absolutely,” Mr. Groves said. “And that is the decision that might be made.”

Mr. Groves declined to comment on the conversation, saying he felt it stands for itself.

Some students and professors say they are heartened by more recent actions taken by the administration. A week after the incident outside the Rotunda, Ms. Sullivan announced that Risa L. Goluboff, the dean of the law school, would chair a working group to assess the university’s response to the rally.

“Our tasks ahead are short-term and long-term,” Ms. Goluboff wrote in a statement. “They are about physical safety and emotional well-being; they are as practical as revising policies and as lofty as advancing human progress; and they will require us to examine what we need to do within our own community and ask what we can do beyond it.”

Claudrena N. Harold, an associate professor of African-American and African studies and history, said she was encouraged by the formation of the working group.

“It’s very important that the university address issues of safety,” she said. “It’s something that needs to be dealt with. There needs to be as much transparency as possible.”

After reading the announcement about the working group, Ms. King, one of the student activists, said she remained skeptical. But she allowed that “a tiny little part of the puzzle is moving.”

‘It’s Never Going to Be the Same’

To outsiders, UVa can seem obsessed with its own history. The university wears its origin story and its traditions on its sleeve; officials have quoted Jefferson so often that professors and students asked them in a petition to stop.

That history can be problematic. Jefferson was a slave owner; the university accepted a donation from the Ku Klux Klan in 1921; and Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, two leaders of the white-supremacist movement and the August rally, are UVa graduates.

When Ms. Sullivan condemned the rally, saying that the participants’ ideology conflicts with the university’s values of respect, diversity, and inclusion, some students and faculty took issue, arguing that, like it or not, white supremacy is part of the university’s history and present reality.

“When people say this is not my Charlottesville, this is not my University of Virginia, I’m just not sure what they’re talking about,” said Devin Willis, a sophomore and secretary of the Black Student Alliance, at a march on campus Monday night. “I think this summer proved that it’s no longer acceptable to abstractify injustice and to treat the past like a story or fiction.”

The march, which was attended by about 400 people, Mr. Willis said, was accompanied by the Black Student Alliance’s list of demands to improve UVa’s racial climate in the wake of the August incident. The demands include the removal of Confederate plaques, a ban on white-supremacist hate groups, required education on white supremacy for all students, an increase in the number of African-American students and faculty, and the inclusion of students of color in the working group investigating the response to the rally.

The students see an opportunity to change the culture at UVa from genteel to more radical. The first sentence of the “Disorientation Guide” declares itself “your first step toward peeling back the sanitized public face of UVa and revealing its true character and history.” The guide appeals to students who feel a “bit out of place in a sea of sundresses and ill-fitting khakis and pastel shorts” and ends with descriptions of the activist clubs and their forthcoming events.

“A lot of the white student body is extremely apathetic and above the racial conversation,” said Mr. Willis, who added that racial slurs were written on dorm-room doors during his first month of school last year.

He spoke quickly and enthusiastically about organizing he has taken part in. “It’s never going to be the same, and that’s a great thing,” he said. “People are finally coming to understand that to not be racist is not enough.”

Mr. Le said the goal is to get more students involved in activism long-term.

“At UVa it’s been hard to get a very steady flow of people working on these things,” he said. “Now we’re trying to really capitalize on this political moment.”

Mr. Le helped distribute copies of the guide to new students during orientation. He said they were generally receptive; some asked for more information about the clubs listed.

UVa has already done more to probe its own history than many universities; many professors have examined the fact that slaves built the original buildings that dot the campus, for example. That reality complicates the idea that UVa’s work to reckon with its past starts now. It also complicates the notion that better acknowledging the past will quickly improve the racial climate.

In 2013 Ms. Sullivan formed the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University to study the institution’s relationship with slavery and make recommendations about how to respond.

“This Commission has uncovered a great deal of the University’s history that was largely forgotten or never known, and the results of their work are being shared with the community through courses, summer workshops for high school students, and coming up, a conference in October,” Ms. Sullivan wrote in an email. “I believe it is worthwhile to expand our focus to the era of Jim Crow, massive resistance, and the civil-rights movement. The administration should support this work, but not get in the way of the scholars who are doing good work.”

Ms. Harold teaches a course on African-American students and activism at UVa, called Black Fire, where students learn that the history of racial-justice activism on campus stretches back roughly 50 years, when African-Americans were first admitted to UVa. In 1969, for example, hundreds of students marched to protest what they viewed as a racist atmosphere on campus and demanded the appointment of a black assistant dean of admissions, according to a Cavalier Daily article from that time. (They also requested that the state legislature raise nonacademic employee wages, something students are still organizing for now.)

“These students are folks who have taken the class,” Ms. Harold said of the activists organizing now. “They understand the history. They are not political blank sheets with no road maps.”

But Ms. Harold said that not everyone’s map is pointing in the same direction and that she didn’t expect the university to reach a consensus on how to move forward.

“There is no monolithic view when it comes to how the university has reckoned with its history and how a reckoning should look,” said Ms. Harold. “But I truly believe for some people, this will change them. It will change us in terms of the questions that we ask — hopefully.”

Clarification (8/24/2017, 12:35 p.m.): This article has been updated to clarify UVa’s guidance to its community. The university discouraged people from attending the “Unite the Right” rally, not from acknowledging it.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.