University of Virginia Library

'Incredible Drama'

Wall Of Silence Palls Founder's Day

By Robert McClain

Now let us all
in closets weep

For in actors
in their striding

Playing out their lives
like nuns
unheard
unloved
before

A wall of Silence

The incredible drama that
occurred there upon the Lawn on
Founder's Day recently is one
which requires considerable
explanation. What could people
mean by risking their academic
careers as they did on that
afternoon when they took part in
forming a Wall of Silence, as Robert
Rosen has so meaningfully
described in yesterday's Cavalier
Daily? In the very face of the direct
threat of suspension and expulsion,
hundreds of students demonstrated
there the spring of their own
discontent with social and
intellectual conditions engendered
by the University.

This writer construes the silent
demonstration in the main as one
expressing dissatisfaction by the
students in the level of their
participation with the ends and the
means of their education here. That
racism also exists here and abroad
in the Commonwealth is also an
essential detail, and indeed, is an
outgrowth of the failure of the
political elite in this state and in the
University itself to recognize the
historic debacle they helped to
cause here on the Grounds last
Monday.

That Virginia has never realized
its human potential is visible all
about us in the slums and back
alleys which are part of this very
University community. This writer
has always been in painful awe of
the diversity that exists between
the profound natural beauty of the
state and the unrealized potential
of its inhabitants, many of whom
even now live in a kind of
intellectual limbo nurtured by the
centralized control of government
from Richmond and by financially
starved public schools many of
which have been efficiently used as
agents of containment.

At the University, one of the
cruelest things that occurs takes the
form of the traditional system of
lecturing and listening. This is
non-participation and non-response.
This is not good education. It is
mass-denial of the effective search
for the benefits of the illimitable
mind. It is self-destructive,
wasteful, degrading, and shameful.

These, then, are some of the
perceptions that prompted this
writer to take part in the
demonstration on the Lawn on
Monday last.

One could not help but feel
some sorrow for the President and
others who took part in the
academic procession on Monday,
walled-in as they were and
seemingly numbed by the dreadful
silence of those who were there
outside the blue ropes. Probably
the walled-in nature of the
procession was a physical
reconstruction of the difficult
position in which the President and
his advisors find themselves most
of the time, a position in which
satisfaction can be provided few
either in Richmond or in the
Student Coalition here.

The writer deeply regrets the
presence on these Grounds of the
scruffy bunch of students who were
those responsible for some
disturbances later on at Cabell Hall
on Founder's Day. There were
many of us who did our best to
quell that type of non-productive
behavior. However, this writer also
regrets that he cannot be held
responsible for admissions policies
which allow for the inclusion in our
student body of persons of this
nature. Crawling out from peeling
woodwork, from time to time, they
continue to embarrass us all. It is
strange that our admissions policies
provide for colleagues such as these

and yet seem to exclude many
others with cleaner, though darker
skins who would be fine students
here.

The illimitable reaches of the
human spirit were at least deeply
probed on Monday last on the
Lawn of this University. A Wall of
Silence haunts many of us still,
sometime, in class, in coping with
some of our colleagues, in
associating with portions of the sad
University community at large, in
reflecting on the graceful green hills
around us, and in dealing
reflectively with our memories of
the disturbing confrontation that
took place on the Lawn on
Founder's Day this week. It was a
time of triumph and disgrace, of
seeking maturity and of losing
innocence; it was a time of the rage
of silence.

Now let us all
in silence search

Thus to guarantee
rebirth

Logos rising
from the dead.