University of Virginia Library

Yes, Faults Do Exist

By David Co

As incoming first-year men, you
have been bombarded with miscellaneous
pamphlets, booklets,
forms, etc. etc. ad nauseam, culminating
with this issue of The
Cavalier Daily, all of which has
reiterated various aspects of our
claim to greatness-and our
peculiarity as well: our sublimely
beautiful Grounds, the customary
deference to our Founder and his
works, the coats-and-ties tradition,
the personal and academic
freedom, and above all, the Honor
System which allows us so much
liberty.

Do not be misled by these
grandiose claims into expecting a
paradise. You will not find it.
No place is perfect, even Mr.
Jefferson's University. True, the
Grounds are sublime, the product
of the vivid genius of a man who
left no facet of "his" University
go untouched-and all beginning at
the age of 75. But at times one
questions the extent of freedom
at an institution dedicated to the
great libertarian doctrines of our
father.

With our rapidly expanding size
comes a torrent of new problems,
this bringing both our education
and our very traditions into review.
Graduate schools seem to be
emphasized by the Administration;
this means, in effect, that many of
the "best" professors teach graduate-not
undergraduate-courses,
leaving green instructors for the
"kids." It means, too, that there
will be a greater proportion of older
students who have a different feeling
for the University that what has
proven to be the tradition-minded
undergraduates.

How to grow raises one of the
most immediately noticeable problems-our
lack of girls. Charlottesville's
female population is
notoriously low, and young women
from our "separate but equal"
sister in Fredericksburg, Mary
Washington College, are clamoring
to get in. Needless to say,
their attempts at storming the Serpentine
Walls have been aided from
within, so that coeducation, coordination,
or sexual segregation
will be the University's biggest
controversy of the decade.

But over all the din about these
lesser (but nonetheless important)
issues is a controversy which in
itself is most peculiar to our University,
a testament to its uniqueness.
This involves how we can
preserve our very uniqueness. What
we wish to avoid above all, as we
grow, is the tendency in many
growing schools toward what is
locally damned as "state U-ism."

Our University probably has the
most private-school atmosphere of
any public university in the country.
It is not a land-grant school,
and shares few of the defects but
many of the qualities thereof. This
has led us to develop certain tastes,
unlike many of those of the stereotyped
collegian. We think for example,
that big brass bands all
wound up in gold braid at football
games are tacky, as are games
played by a group of names without
faces in a huge bowl of a
hundred thousand flesh-colored
blobs, similarly without faces. We
prefer-most of us-to watch-our
group of scholar-athletes do their
best in the cozy atmosphere of
Scott Stadium. They may not win
too often, but the air is infinitely
more personal. Thus, to us, is more
important.

Indeed, a cozy, personal atmosphere
generally pervades the
columns, an atmosphere so absent
in the multiversity. Our Honor
System is both the cornerstone and
the capstone of this tradition. To
preserve this air of personality as
the University undergoes inevitable
and rapid growth is the challenge
of our era. We are not "U. Va.,"
we are "The University," and
hope to remain so.