Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer: Charlottesville and the Politics of Hate by Rodney A. Smolla

Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer: Charlottesville and the Politics of Hate by Rodney A. Smolla

Author:Rodney A. Smolla
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Political Process, Discrimination, Political Advocacy, 21st Century, United States, Political Science, History
ISBN: 9781501749650
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-05-14T23:00:00+00:00


24

THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY

The University of Virginia, with the rest of Charlottesville, was bracing for the Unite the Right onslaught. As with many American universities, UVA’s relationship to the city surrounding it was complicated. It is not at all unusual for universities to be perceived as in the city in which they reside, but not of the city. As I consider my two alma maters, Yale, where I attended college, and Duke, where I attended law school, the distance between town and gown was palpable. One of my daughters, Erin, attended Duke as an undergraduate and a law student decades after me. Another daughter, Corey, then attended Yale for college. As we compared family notes over our experiences, some progression in engagement appeared to have taken place. Yale, which rests in the geographic center of New Haven, Connecticut, had established more outreach and engagement programs with the city than existed when I was there. Duke had made similar progress with Durham, North Carolina. Yet even so, parent and children were agreed that members of the university community thought of themselves principally as citizens of Yale or Duke, not New Haven or Durham. In her book Becoming, Michelle Obama makes a similar point about the University of Chicago. Michelle Robinson grew up in Chicago’s South Side, where the University of Chicago is located, in the City’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Yet to her, the university was an insular fortress, largely disconnected from the neighborhoods and city that surrounded it. Michelle Obama would, later in her professional career, be hired by Michael Riordan at the University of Chicago Medical Center to create programs to make the university more relevant to Chicago’s South Side, and the South Side relevant to the university. My life would later intersect with Riordan’s, as he moved from Chicago to take over the Greenville Hospital System in Greenville, South Carolina, at the same time that I moved to Greenville to become president of Furman University. We worked on similar programs to attempt to more deeply connect both Furman and the Greenville Hospital System to the community surrounding both institutions. While we made some progress, the task was not easy.

In Charlottesville, much the same dynamic existed. In the collection of essays edited by Professors Louis P. Nelson and Claudrena N. Harold on the events in Charlottesville in 2017, they observe that prior to the summer of 2017, the University of Virginia as an institution “generally positioned itself as separate from the city.”1 To be sure, many individuals within the UVA community were committed to the community, but this was not the institutional ethos of the university as a whole. As Nelson and Harold put it, “Faculty, staff, and some students understood themselves to be citizens of the city and participated in these conversations as individual activists, but the institution stood alongside the city disengaged.”2

There were additional layers of complexity and intensity for UVA. Some of the layers were unique to UVA, arising from its founding by Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, to its complicity in the eugenics movement and the resurgence of racism in the 1920s.



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