University of Virginia Library

Conservative Contradictions

There is a fundamental contradiction in
the position of the conservative quadrivium
who met with representatives of Governor
Holton yesterday in Richmond and
recommended that the Governor decide
against making any changes in the present
selection procedure for the University's Board
of Visitors. According to these students, the
necessity for "experience" and
"professionalism" require that the same types
of people continue to receive Board
appointments.

They were right in stating that the
paramount qualifications of Board members
ought to be professionalism and experience;
there can be few arguments about that. They
were mistaken, however, in maintaining that
the present method insures that men with
these qualities are selected to the Board.

Let's look at professionalism. The people
on the Board now are indeed professionals
professional lawyers, professional doctors, and
professional businessmen. When it comes to
running a University, however, they are
amateurs. In limited amounts, the
professionalism they have gained in other
fields can be helpful, but it must be balanced
by the contributions of others if the
University is to be properly run.

Much the same holds for their second
criterion, experience. The members of the
Board have little or no experience as
educators. They have only that knowledge
gained when they were students, and that is so
long behind them as to be of questionable
value. The people that Council and other
innovators seek to appoint have experience
that can be of value - experience as teachers,
experience as students, experience as leaders
of modern movements and modes of thought.
This is the type of experience that the Board
needs to govern a University which is
composed of teachers, students, and thinkers.

To this, Mr. Holton's supplicants say that
the roles of teachers, administrators, and
students are not interchangeable. They ignore
the fact that since the inception of
administration at the University,
administrators have been faculty members;
the University takes great pride in this. And in
recent years, students have been added to the
administrative process, on several levels with
appreciable success.

It would seem then that the upshot of the
conservative quadrivium argument is simply
opposition to change in any form - "Bring
back the old University." We hope that
Governor Holton is intelligent enough to
disregard their advice.