And Faulkner lives forever.

Because it feels personal, I offer my perspective on the federal government’s assault on the University of Virginia. The Justice Department’s demand for the head of President James Ryan spurs me to describe two earlier chapters of my alma mater’s administration. My tale weaves in and out of the American arc over four centuries toward, and away from, an equitable society. Which way we are swinging should be obvious. If it’s not, bear with me.

When I attended UVA (1977-81), it had a fine academic reputation and an august founding narrative. I found it culturally conservative and a bastion of what we now recognize as white male privilege—of which I have always been a beneficiary, though at the time it was just what was. For those born in recent decades, it’s impossible to convey the good-old-boy racism of a place like “Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village.” Fraternities were dominant in the culture. Undergraduate women had been admitted for only seven years, and Black students were rare—fewer than 500 out of some 14,000. I never had a Black professor or TA. I had one Black friend, though acquaintance would be more accurate—he disappeared after one semester. Charlottesville was a Southern backwater, a judgment I formed over the summer after my freshman year, when I worked construction and experienced the town’s racial chasm as a divide between skilled and unskilled labor. Nevertheless I pinched myself walking Thomas Jefferson’s “Grounds,” and I had some excellent professors.

In the history department, where I would spend several years immersed in the ante- and post-bellum South, the atmosphere was of homage to emeritus professor Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in history. Viewed more skeptically was Fawn Brodie’s 1974 biography of Jefferson, which revealed to a wider audience that our founding father also fathered six children by Sally Hemings (a fact well known in some Charlottesville precincts). Up on the hill at Monticello, none of that history was discussed; today it is inseparable from the narrative tourists receive.

For years, when people asked about my college experience, I said that I spent the first three years at war with the administration and the fourth studying. My foxhole was the student newspaper, and nearly everything I know about journalism I learned from my editors at The Cavalier Daily. Among them: Robert Melton, who went on to The Washington Post; George Rodrigue and Mike Vitez, who won Pulitzers; and Nancy Kenney, who wound up at The New York Times. In my first year on the paper, my beat was the administration; I met regularly with the dean of students and the provost, relationships that were cordial and occasionally adversarial.

The Cavalier Daily had no faculty advisor; the school had no journalism department. We had free office space in the student union and a modest subsidy from the student activity fund (which we surrendered rather than relinquish the monthly stipend we paid editors, all of which went to the basement rathskeller for take-out sandwiches while putting out the paper). Our relationship to the university was technical: the board was the publisher.

The crucible during my three years on the paper was the university president’s attempt to impose a censorship board over us, prompted by members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. Rodrigue, as editor-in-chief, had denied them column space because of their affiliation with a political group; the paper didn’t accept guest columns from any political group, not because of their politics but because they were political.

The president was Frank Hereford, a UVA physics professor the board had hired in 1974. That January The Cavalier Daily reported his membership in a whites-only country club (no Jews either, even as guests), and Rodrigue (along with Jim Reagen and Jim Grossberg) was among those relaying developments in the controversy—which spread to the Charlottesville Daily Progress, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Washington Post, New York Times and even Time magazine. The “CD” waged a crusade demanding his resignation from the club and regularly reported complaints from Black students that the administration ignored the problems of a tiny minority at an institution literally built by their enslaved ancestors. The Daily Progress and the Times-Dispatch defended Hereford’s “right of free association.” Their respective headlines were “A Test of Liberalism” and “Unfair Demands.” The Daily Progress publisher was a club member. So were about 150 faculty members.

The Farmington Country Club’s president told the Post, “Hell, we’re not going to run the club to suit the university.”

Hereford’s membership was a symbol of the university’s insufficient effort to attract Black faculty and students. Hereford’s, and the university’s, perceived indifference to the problems of Black students was the context for the controversy. In an article in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Black students told a reporter that Hereford’s membership was “an issue for white liberals trying to satisfy their collective conscience.”

For Black students, the November 1975 article reported, “the reality of life in that overwhelmingly white community is isolation—isolation from the majority of students, something they seem to expect, isolation from the black communities they grew up in, and even isolation from each other inside the university.”

The Times, in December, in so many words suggested the mounting debate was central to the dilemma facing what had been—and in many ways still was—the capital of the Confederacy. Professor Paul Gaston told the paper, “The problem is how the university can remain loyal to the traditions of an older Virginia and, at the same time, protect and further its reputation as a national and international university that appeals to people with the most disparate backgrounds.” (Wow, does that resonate a half-century later.)

Finally, after a mail-in poll of club members rejected a change in policy by 2-1 and the board reaffirmed no change, Hereford resigned.

How do I know all this, 50 years later? Because in 2021, at a CD alumni weekend, the editor-in-chief and leader of the campaign, Dusty Melton—older brother of my mentor Robert—gave us a set of photocopied clips and outlined the story I have summarized above. In his swan song published after his term ended in March 1976, Melton wrote of the Hereford saga: “The far more important and immediate lesson to remember is the disgrace the University suffered in the national press and at home for his intransigence and callous disregard for the people and school entrusted to his leadership.”

It would only be human to hold a grudge against the paper that fomented the issue.

Fast-forward not quite two years, when Hereford demanded imposition of the “media board” in the 1977-78 academic year. The president continued to do so when Mike Vitez succeeded Rodrigue. In 1979, when Rick Neel succeeded Vitez, Hereford issued an ultimatum: agree to the supervision of the media board or lose your office space. Neel said, Um, no. Hereford said: then you’re out of your office.

That the university founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence would close the student newspaper was too delicious.

The Charlottesville Daily Progress told us: Y’all can work here. The national press picked up the story. After three days of using our office phones (the doors remained unlocked) and composing the paper across town at the Progress (where we were increasingly a pain in the ass), students rallied on the Lawn and marched to Hereford’s castle. Meanwhile, Neel made a deal: The paper would acknowledge the authority of the media board provided it had no actual authority. I don’t recall that we ever heard another word about said media board.

(My favorite photos from college are of the student protest. In the one at top, a student holds a sign, “THE CD MAY SUCK BUT IT DOESN’T KISS ASS.” Just above I captured Hereford’s wife Ann, standing in front of her house and smoking a cigarette, glaring at students angry at her husband.)

Our spat more than four decades ago was nothing compared to the Harvard/Columbia/Paul, Weiss/etc. treatment from Donald Trump’s Civil Rights Division, which appears committed to turning UVA into something like Hereford’s country club. And making each of us kiss ass.

The UVA board in March, aligning with Trump executive orders, demanded dissolution of the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships (successor to the Office of Minority Affairs Hereford had created after his ordeal). Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has mimicked Trump’s cultural agenda, praised the board’s action. Diversity programs were a hallmark of James Ryan’s tenure, and several board members reportedly urged the board to fire Ryan, either out of fear that Trump would pull, by the Times’s estimate, $355 million in research contracts (a contract is a contract unless it’s with the government) or because they hold similar views about threats to white privilege. We don’t know, as they have been silent since Ryan’s resignation two days ago.

The Civil Rights Division, like other executive agencies, has had its purpose turned on its head. The assistant attorney general, Harmeet K. Dhillon, has a lengthy list of press clips on her former firm’s website personally attacking Democrats and defending Republicans. Her deputy Gregory W. Brown was an attorney in Charlottesville affiliated with the Jefferson Council, a group of (aging) alumni aiming to “lead the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence.” Its founders include Bert Ellis, a Youngkin UVA board appointee whom the governor fired in March for unspecified violations of the state’s “Code of Conduct for Boards and Commissions” and the UVA board’s own statement of responsibilities. Ellis led notorious critiques of Ryan’s tenure, especially his efforts to diversify the student body.

It was Gregory Brown, The New York Times reported, who demanded Ryan’s resignation as the price of ending the government’s investigation bent on enforcing Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. Brown sued Ryan and UVA twice last year. Matan Goldstein, an Israeli-American freshman, alleged antisemitic harassment by UVA officials and pro-Palestinian groups. He also represented Morgan Bettinger, a 2021 graduate who was accused of mocking a Black Women Matter protest and reportedly faced expulsion until UVA’s investigation found insufficient evidence. Both cases were settled.

After Youngkin fired Bert Ellis, he nominated Ken Cuccinelli to succeed him. Cuccinelli is a former state attorney general and Homeland Security official during Trump’s first term. (A federal judge in 2020 ruled that Cuccinelli’s appointment as acting head of the Citizenship and Immigration Services violated federal vacancy law and he therefore lacked authority to issue policy directives.) Cuccinelli’s nomination, and those of seven others to state college boards, was rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate Privileges and Elections Committee on May 30. State law requires confirmation by the House and Senate, but Youngkin told the board to seat his nominees anyway because the House and Senate in full had not acted. The Senate committee’s Democrats last week sued the three boards’ chairs. On June 24 Youngkin named four more board members to succeed those appointed by his predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam. Youngkin will have seated the entire board as of July.

The outrageousness of this chapter led me to review the third. It’s something of a precursor.

In June 2012 board chair Helen Dragas, with no warning, asked for the resignation of President Theresa Sullivan, hired in 2010, and Sullivan submitted it. After two weeks of uproar, during which it was revealed that Dragas had acted without a vote of the board and had failed to follow its procedures, the board unanimously reinstated her. Republican Governor Bob McDonnell reappointed Dragas days later, and the Republican-controlled General Assembly confirmed her for a second four-year term when it met in January 2013. Sullivan announced her intention to retire in 2017, and Ryan succeeded her in August 2018.

Nine months after the Dragas episode, the American Association of University Professors released an investigative report. It is fascinating in its probe of the institution and of the incident. Striking is its analysis of the board:

“According to everyone with whom the investigating committee spoke, the critical factor leading to appointment to what is a much sought-after post, considered to be among the most prestigious the governor can make, at least until last summer, has been the amount of financial contribution the appointee has made to the governor’s electoral campaign. . .

“Rector Dragas, a UVA alumna with a bachelor’s degree in economics and foreign affairs awarded in 1984 and an MBA from the Darden School received in 1988, is a successful real-estate developer from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Most of the other members of the board also come from business backgrounds, several, like Ms. Dragas, from successful medium-sized enterprises; few have had experience with large, complex business organizations or the administration of institutions of higher education.”

Nearly all the current board members are lawyers or business executives. Most have one or more degrees from Virginia. To what extent they have contributed to Youngkin’s political operations, I don’t know. But I can surmise their alignment with his values.

Coda. In 1976 the Robert F. Kenndy Journalism Awards recognized as Best Student Coverage a Cavalier Daily series the year before “setting forth the complaints and concerns of the black students at U.Va. As articulated by black student leaders these included the observations that the social atmosphere was geared exclusively toward white students; that the university had conducted many studies of minority needs at the school but had been slow to act on the findings; that too few blacks were hired as faculty and fewer yet attained high positions in the school administration; and in essence that there was a lack of commitment to the betterment of the quality of life for minority students. . .

“Much credit is due the Cavalier Daily for the substantial coverage given to the events of last fall which led to the creation of the Office of Minority Affairs.”

It is that successor office which the University board has now dissolved.