University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan is taking heat today for two different e-mails she sent yesterday. One went to students, faculty and staff, while the other was sent to donors and alumni. Sandy Hausman reports the latest chapter of Charlottesville’s on-going summer of unrest.
Dozens of students gathered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson at UVA’s iconic building, the Rotunda. Three climbed up and dropped a tarp over the university’s founder in protest of the fact that he owned slaves. The next day, President Teresa Sullivan sent a note to students, faculty and staff expressing her disagreement with the action but supporting the protesters First Amendment rights.
In a note to alumni and donors, however, she condemned the “desecration of what some of us consider sacred.”
"What really bothered me, I think, was the notion that students had somehow desecrated something," said Janet Spittler is an associate professor of religious studies. “We’ve seen that ground desecrated by fascists with torches. The students Tuesday evening were not desecrating anything.”
She had gone to the protest Tuesday to help protect and support her students:
"I think that for a lot of faculty the image of students surrounded by white supremacists with torches being beaten and burned – that really haunts us."
So she and a colleague, Associate Professor Carl Shuve, were dismayed by Sullivan’s characterization of the demonstration.
"I think what we saw on Tuesday night was intellectual activity. We saw what is supposed to be happening at a university. There’s no doubt that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and that the University of Virginia was built, in part, by slave labor, and that this complicates what it means to be part of this community," he explained.
The two also objected to a mention, in the e-mails, of someone being arrested for public intoxication, leading readers to assume one of the protesters was drunk. In fact, the guy in question was not a student but someone from the area who was carrying a gun.
Sullivan did not mention key demands made by the protesters – to increase the number of African-American students and faculty, to teach more about slavery and its role at UVA and to offer low-income staffers a living wage.