University of Virginia Library

The Protests At UVa

(Reprinted From The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot)

While the student protests at the University
of Virginia are to be considered in the
context of what's happening on college
campuses throughout the United States, the
protesters' style is true to Charlottesville
traditions.

In the customary phrase, they could even
be said to reflect credit upon the University.

The demonstrations started with members
of the "radical" Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) and Southern Students Organizing
Committee (SSOC), who organized a
rally while the Board of Visitors was meeting
at the University last Saturday. Their demands
were ignored by the Board. (In the attention
given to the protests, it has gone practically
unnoticed that the Board authorized the
University to accept coeds, starting in 1970.)

The conventional pattern is for the
students to commit an outrage of some sort
when the administration does not capitulate
to their demands. But what happened at the
University.

A "coat-and-tie" demonstration was organized
by leaders of the "student establishment"
(their term), and it was followed by a
larger noon rally Tuesday, the third in four
days.

All the demonstrations were orderly, to
the extent that the students shifted the rally
Tuesday to the front of the Rotunda in order
to protect the grass on the Lawn. The effect is
to reinforce the protest by taming its tactics.

Because the students have been acting with
conventional good manners, it is not possible
to ignore what they are saying and deplore
what they are doing.

Although the demands of the students
seem to multiply with the rallies, they
embrace two main points — one, that the
University do more for the Negro, and two,
that it do better by its employees.

On the first point, the students want the
University to undertake a desegregation
program (it has been desegregated for years),
to appoint a Negro as assistant dean of
admissions, to begin to recruit Negroes on
athletic scholarships and to stop sending
academic recruiters to secondary schools
which discriminate against black students, to
initiate a program of black studies, as well as
such things as waiving the $10 application fee
for low-income students.

On the second point, they want better pay
and the right to collective bargaining for
employees of the University.

They are also asking that the black, poor,
and young be represented on the Board of
Visitors. ("Why are you all white? Why are
you all rich? Why are you all Visitors?" asked
a poster. There are answers, but not of a sort
satisfying to students.)

Criticism is concentrated upon C. Stuart
Wheatley, who is asked to resign from the
Board of Visitors because of his "racist"
support of Massive Resistance — a point that
is probably unfair to Mr. Wheatley and
unlikely to move the current Governor of
Virginia, who was the quarterback of Massive
Resistance in the State Senate and since has
been converted, like Saul on the road to
Damascus, to the cause of education.

Though many who love the University will
be pained by the subject, as they are by the
idea of protests at the Rotunda, the students
are saying serious things in a serious way.
They deserve, and surely will get, a hearing by
the University.

(For that matter, ex-radicals may recall
that The Cavalier Daily was proposing the
desegregation of the University before the
Brown decision and the Massive Resistance,
and even earlier Karl Shapiro wrote a poem
about the University starting with the bitter
line, To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew is
the curriculum.)

Controversy is not to be feared at Mr.
Jefferson's University, and sometimes a little
bit of it is good for the soul. And surely it is
beyond controversy, in 1969, that the Negro
is to be included in the goal of making the
University of Virginia the capstone of public
education in the State.