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Each summer I make a point of stopping by a first-year orientation session at the University of Virginia, where I have been a professor in the music department for 18 years. The sessions take place in the historic concert hall on the floor below my office. On June\u00a030, members of the Class of 2029 danced their arrival wearing the university\u2019s colors of blue and orange.<\/p>\n
Usually, the raw enthusiasm and promise of the students reminds me why, on many days, I love my job. It didn\u2019t work this time. I just couldn\u2019t resolve the dissonance between the fantasy and the reality. The fantasy was of a college education these young people worked so hard to land. In real life, the Department of Justice had just pressured our president, Jim Ryan, into quitting, demanding his resignation to supposedly resolve an investigation into the university\u2019s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.<\/p>\n
This is almost old news by now. But it shouldn\u2019t be. There is a direct line between the Jan.\u00a06 insurrection and the 2017 Unite the Right march, when, just days before first-year students started school, a few hundred white nationalists emboldened by the first Trump presidency marched across campus with their torches, chanting, \u201cJews will not replace us.\u201d The legal historian Farah Peterson, who used to teach here, writes that \u201can embrace of violence to assert constitutional claims\u201d is baked into our history and that the founders understood violence as a way of making legal arguments.<\/p>\n
The charge against UVA by the Department of Justice is being led by two UVA alums. One of them, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general who overlapped with Jim Ryan at UVA law school, served as co-chair in 2020 of Lawyers for Trump, which challenged the presidential election results, and represented Trump in a defamation suit involving Stormy Daniels.<\/p>\n
The ousting of Jim Ryan was not a surprise. But even after the Trump administration\u2019s relentless siege on universities, it was a gut punch. Those of us who teach here have predicted for months that the Board of Visitors would try to fire Ryan this July, when all of its appointed members would be Gov. Glenn Youngkin\u2019s appointees. We\u2019ve been through that before. In 2012, when the Board of Visitors fired then-president Teresa Sullivan, faculty, students and alumni stood up to resist corporate America infringing on the educational mission of the university, and the board reinstated her.<\/p>\n
Youngkin\u2019s newest appointees to UVA\u2019s board include the controversial Ken Cuccinelli, who, when he was the state attorney general, led an assault on academic freedom in the form of a civil investigation targeting five grants held by climate scientist Michael Mann. Youngkin, for his part, has long intended to purge the state\u2019s education system of \u201cdivisive concepts\u201d\u2014things like acknowledging the fact that the buildings of Jefferson\u2019s \u201cAcademical Village\u201d were built by the enslaved. When the Board of Visitors banned DEI in March of this year, Youngkin gleefully stated, \u201cDEI is done at the University of Virginia. We stand for the universal truth that everyone is created equal, and opportunity is at the heart of Virginians\u2019 and Americans\u2019 future.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think we know whom he means by \u201ceveryone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beloved by many here, including me, Ryan is perhaps a once-in-a-generation leader. Still, he is so very far from \u201cwoke.\u201d As the student satire magazine put it, \u201cFly high Jim, we\u2019ll never forget the early mornings, late nights, and also the several hundred state troopers you sent to attack students for peacefully protesting.\u201d In May 2024, Ryan did not hesitate to crack down on a very small pro-Palestine encampment. No one at the university cracked down on those tiki torch\u2013bearing white nationalists.<\/p>\n
Here is what we are guilty of: believing that our professional duty requires us to openly reflect on our individual and collective responsibilities in a democracy. We do think it\u2019s our job to give our students tools to respond to the world they will inherit. If we were guilty of or capable of \u201cleft-wing indoctrination,\u201d I suspect we would have a different governor and maybe different other things, too. Almost 70\u00a0percent of our students are from Virginia.<\/p>\n
Because we are guilty of believing that history matters, we can\u2019t ignore the wicked irony of a federal and state government killing diversity-related programs and forcing out a president in part by leveraging the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in1868. This amendment, which mandated equal protection for all humans, is now weaponized to protect only white people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. It has been similarly weaponized. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, our history also includes these facts: The UVA biology department taught eugenics until 1953. Not only was the institution built by enslaved laborers, but by 1829 it had its very own slave patrol. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson wanted to establish a University of Virginia in part because too many young men went north and learned the evils of abolition. Such thinking amounted to a canker \u201ceating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.\u201d More recently, the Office for Civil Rights did not approve the commonwealth of Virginia\u2019s plan for desegregating higher education until 1982.<\/p>\n
My current and former students have been texting from all over the world since Ryan\u2019s June\u00a027 resignation announcement. Mostly they want to know: Why UVA? Virginia is arguably ground zero for reckoning with the chattel slave system and its intertwining with a flailing fantasy of democracy. \u201cThe 1619 Project\u201d made front-page news of it. But you don\u2019t have to go back that far.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the summer of 2017, for many Charlottesville now conjures images of burning torches and Nazi slogans. Over the weekend of Aug.\u00a011 and 12, 2017, the sleeping dogs of America\u2019s nasty history rose up from the evidently not dead. Richard Spencer (UVA, Class of 2001) helped orchestrate a torchlit nighttime march across our campus, the marchers barking, \u201cBlood and soil\u201d and \u201cJews will not replace us.\u201d The university let this happen. In her book about the weekend of Unite the Right and the ideology that inspired it, Deborah Baker writes, \u201cThe nature of this awakening appeared to go to the core of who we are and the myths and folklore that have sustained us as a nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also that weekend of Unite the Right, a young woman was murdered and dozens were injured when a neo-Nazi drove a car into a group of counterprotesters. While the city was still reeling, Trump went on television and claimed there had been \u201cvery fine people on both sides.\u201d There was an uproar and a backlash then. And in September 2017, the president had no choice but to sign a congressional joint resolution condemning the violence and domestic terrorist attack in Charlottesville. It is clear that no such condemnation would be forthcoming today.<\/p>\n
This administration will not stop with Jim Ryan, and they will not stop with UVA. The miraculous dean who got those first-year students to dance on a hot June\u00a0day in 2025 will get them dancing at their graduation in May of 2029. But I am very afraid of what this university, and other institutions of higher learning across the country, will look and feel like by then.<\/p>\n
Bonnie Gordon is a professor of music at the University of Virginia and vice president of the American Musicological Society.<\/em><\/p>\n