Today Sunday 20 May 2018 I went to the University of Virginia (UVA) graduation ceremony which includes “walking the lawn” in front of the Rotunda. The ritual is that graduating students should walk from the Rotunda on UVA grounds through the lawn out into the world as a symbol of taking learning from here to elsewhere. Before seeing it I had doubts that a graduation walk could be different here as compared to other places, but the layout of the “Academical Village” in which the ceremony takes place, and the intent of the attendees, and the history of events on the Lawn, and all the effort that the school puts into making this graduation unique to the culture of UVA really works as a memorable experience and performance.
On Friday 18 May 2018 I went to a reception dinner with my colleagues at the Data Science Institute, and the graduating students, and the students’ families. I did not think too hard about the reception and showed up without expectations. If I had thought more, I might have anticipated that of course the event was more for the parents than the students, and that it was to be a way for the students to communicate to their families the sort of instructors and school and educational program which had engaged them in their graduate studies. None of this is surprising. What was a little surprising was that all the parents with whom I spoke asked me to define data science and basic characteristics of what their students studied. I even met a parent who described their career in data science, but of course “data science” as a discipline was not formalized in their time and although they knew their professional practices they were not familiar with the current standardization of the field. There are fewer than 40 students getting master’s degrees so this was an intimate cohort. With enrollment increasing it is unlikely that there will be another cohort of students graduating from here who know all their peers, and would meet everyone else’s families, and who share so many research experiences in common. This is the last year when anyone will be able to go into a reception of the Data Science Institute and be one degree of separation from every conversation in the room on such an evening.
I just heard the commencement speech of Teresa Sullivan, outgoing president of the University of Virginia and who gave the speech as part of her exit. I have not met her and do not know the politics of the place. I thought it was encouraging that when she described the schools conferring degrees, she mentioned the Data Science Institute separately because it has a special status as something other than a school. It was the only such organization she named.
In her speech she talked about the Lewis and Clark expedition. I do not know what to make of this. In Charlottesville’s ongoing controversy of statues commemorating the success that particular white people had in using their wealth and resources to advocate for white power, student and activist groups have been re-branding Clark as a person famous for ethnic killing of Native Americans. Protesters kept a statue of Clark wrapped in a shroud for months. Everyone has their faults but I would not be quick to speak nicely about anyone with a mass murder association. I have no idea of the majority culture here. The mass media news of the past few years either does not register this university in the national consciousness or portrays it as a tragedy for people to gawk at as entertainment. The president mentioned the tragedies which this graduating class experienced the past four years.
One tragedy was “A Rape on Campus“, the article in Rolling Stone. Other commentators have well discussed this article elsewhere, but I have one off-the-wall comment to add to demonstrate thinking here. The article described an egregious culture of male students raping female students at the University of Virginia. The impact of the article was that when it came out, everyone believed it and various students seeking reform for safety, civility, and quality used the momentum to make positive social changes. It was a very stressful issue to address. Later people found that the particulars of the article were either careless or a hoax or mistaken or exaggerated. The biggest problem with this was that false information in the article diminished the credibility of anyone calling for women’s safety as now there was high profile misinformation exposed as inappropriately accusatory. A point that I can add to the conversation which might not be covered elsewhere is that part of UVA culture is to say that university people and events are “on grounds” and not on “campus”. The title of the Rolling Stone article is striking to anyone at the university just because everyone here corrects everyone else here to avoid calling this place a campus and to only talk about the grounds. This practice is odd and ubiquitous. When the author titled their paper either they were ignorant that using the word “campus” would clearly mark them as an outsider to this university’s culture, and would indicate that the article is from the perspective of someone who knew so little about local culture that they could not write with the common terms which local people used. Another possibility is that the author was not writing the article for and with the local people. I know that it seems like the smallest issue – noticing a regional word choice and being upset about that in the context of a national conversation about sexual assault – but I affirm that the culture of this university immediately tags this article as the view of an outsider looking in. The issue of “outsiders getting in to change the culture” is pressing here locally and elsewhere. Activism is nice but in a national or global context it can take on a patronizing feel, and although everyone wants the less fortunate to have fair opportunity and all good treatment, no smaller community likes to have more assertive, more media-savvy communities come in with limited understanding and say that the only path to civilization is the way that some larger urban center does things. Respect on people’s own terms matters!
Another tragedy is the arrest of Otto Warmbier. This was a University of Virginia student who went on an adventure vacation to North Korea. All crimes there are serious and it seems that he choose to push by engaging in the most minor act of vandalism. The government arrested him and, perhaps under torture, forced him to explain UVA culture to them. He told the North Korean government about the utterly trite aspects of the shared student experience of being at this university and they incorporated aspects of UVA culture into the confession speech which they wrote for him and ordered him to speak. Anyone outside UVA is unlikely to detect the local significance of his speech, but now that I have been here for a while, his speech sounds horrifying for taking the fun parts of the culture here and reframing them as monstrous deviancy to overthrow North Korea. One point is that there is a secret organization called the Z Society here through which wealthy alumni do philanthropy for the university. In the student’s confession he accused the Z Society of plotting his crime as an attack on North Korea. Of course the speech is insane and in normal circumstances there is no merit to arresting the student or considering whether a university might be involved. In this case North Korea was looking for an example. It seems strange to me that everyone is in consensus that North Korea is a sort of lawful-evil: other Americans go to North Korea and obey the laws and there is no problem. There seems to be consensus that the student here did the minor vandalism and that it was very foolish of him to break a law in North Korea. The strange part here is that North Korea seems to be operating with an honor code; they wanted a hostage and it had to be someone with obvious malicious or mischievous intent. They might instead have accused someone who had done nothing, or accused someone who did something wrong but mistakenly, and instead I think North Korea is keeping a reputation for being safe enough for visitors who try to follow every rule. In my conversations here I have never heard others doubt that the student broke the local law with intent to do so. The situation makes for strange conversation where no one thinks that the student should die for minor vandalism, but also people think that if someone is in North Korea, they know what they are doing, and they really ought to follow the rules. Overall the student’s arrest and execution was part of the shared experience of this cohort of students.
A third tragedy is the Unite the Right rally. Nazis came to Charlottesville to demand white power. One Nazi killed a counter demonstrator. I have not been here long enough to read the mood of the student body, but my impression is that everyone knows this event and has an opinion about it. The more local, more American students generally feel intensely about the experience and continue to think deeply about diversity, inclusion, racism, the nature of protest, violence in the United States, and toxicity in politics. I could be off on this, but I think that foreign students, especially those who have not been in the United States for long and are here for studies, are left out of discussions about the meaning of this. Every action in the Unite the Right demonstration and response and aftermath is heavy on cultural connotation and although the university administration and student body organized a lot of community conversation, I have doubts that the non-American students are taking away a comparable experience and understanding of this as compared to the Americans. I think this is regrettable. I have not been here long enough to understand how public relations works. The mass media portrays Charlottesville as a outpost of Nazis. At least some foreign students – and I have not talked with a representative sample, but I talked enough to get some opinions – seem to have the takeaway that the United States has out of control nonsense happen with regularity for no reason. Local people here are quick to say that the Nazi demonstrators mostly came from out of town and that Charlottesville itself is a friendly place. I have no idea what to think. One of the statues under protest is of General Lee. Supposedly the statue was a recent establishment in which the city bulldozed a black neighborhood and raised a racist leader to demonstrate the white entry to the center of local black livelihood. The other statue is Clark being powerful on a horse in front of cowering and helplessly defiant Native Americans whom he will have killed. When I arrived in Charlottesville in March these statues were under shrouds. Lately the shrouds are off. I do not understand why. To me it seems like taking off the shrouds is either deference to the Nazis or in hopes that by reverting to the status quo then the controversy over removal of Confederate monuments and memorials will go away.
I am not sure how to access enough information or thought or community discussion to know what to think. What a time to graduate from here! When I think back I do not remember learning anything in school. Obviously I learned, and if I look back to introductory textbooks the information inside all seems so obvious to me even though I remember feeling as a student that everything in the books was new information. I expect that when these students think back, they will also remember less of the learning experience, and more about how the university made them feel and how they felt during certain events. I only expect that this set of students must be feeling a mix of guilt, responsibility, privilege, helplessness, safety, danger, community, isolation, power, and futility. Charlottesville and the University of Virginia are sending out a group of young people with intense shared experiences this year.