University of Virginia Library

Columnist Blasts UVa Growth;
Suggests Shannon Take Heed

By PETER SHEA

Students at the University were
praised in a column carried
nation-wide earlier this week for
their efforts in fighting the
anticipated numerical expansion
here.

The columnist, Russell Kirk,
noted the University Tuesday
demonstrations against growth and
"applauded" students and
organizations who organized and
participated in the protest.

Mr. Kirk is a contributing editor
for the conservative National
Review whose column is syndicated
in hundreds of newspapers in the
United States.

Humane Scale

Mr. Kirk said the students
demonstrating here last month
"were protesting in favor of the
purpose of a university. A
university is supposed to be an
academic community, on a humane
scale. President Shannon and his
administrators, and some other
misguided folk, in the seats of the
mighty, are trying to convert the
university into another academic
collectivity, a Behemoth A. & M."

"More than a hundred student
organizations joined this cheerful
but serious protest-nearly every
student organization on the
campus," Mr. Kirk explained. "And
they were right to join.

Overcrowded

"For the evidence is
overwhelming that the University
of Virginia is overcrowded already.
In many classes, a dozen or a score
of students must stand for lack of
seats. Student parking is a hopeless
mess, and traffic in Charlottesville
is not only dismal but dangerous.
Some 1,016 undergraduate men
applied for dormitory rooms; only
460 obtained them," the columnist
stated.

"These things and worse have
happened at many other state
universities. But at Charlottesville,"
he added, "the students have not
wholly forgotten Thomas
Jefferson's intention for the
university in whose founding and
whose very buildings he had so
large a hand. The University of
Virginia was meant to be a place of
academic retreat, where the best
intellects among the rising
generation could meet in leisure
and beauty. It was not meant to be
Behemoth State U.," Mr. Kirk
declared.

Good-Natured

"By tradition," he continued,
"the student body at Charlottesville
is good-natured and patient; this is
no Berkeley or Columbia in temper.
But by stupid ignoring of students'
real grievances...the university's
administration may succeed in
alienating and angering even the
most moderate and thoughtful of
students," he warned.

"Patrick Henry declared that
George III might profit by the
example of certain other monarchs
who had ended unhappily; so might
President Edgar Shannon profit by
the example of Chancellor Clark
Kerr, at Berkeley," Mr. Kirk
advised.

Question

"The question of growth, said
Mr. Shannon last February, is one
'we can scarcely afford to debate.'
Indeed? Perhaps now he can't
afford not to debate it," the
columnist concluded.

Mr. Kirk's column is his second
attack on expansion at the
University to be carried in
publications nation-wide. An earlier
piece he wrote this summer for the
National Review touched off an
exchange of letters in the magazine
between the columnist and William
Fishback, director of the
University's Information Services,
in which they debated the growth
issue.