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What distinguishes this moment from the others in which UVA was thrust into the national spotlight is that it asks the community to reflect on itself and its relationship with outside forces. The white supremacists “threw down the challenge to say, ‘This place belongs to us,’” said Woolfork, the English professor. “Now, students are coming back and saying, ‘No, this is mine.’”

For Wes Gobar, a senior double-majoring in history and government who serves as the president of UVA’s Black Student Alliance, the violent clashes in Charlottesville demonstrate the urgent need for telling the honest history of the school—a history that includes students and faculty who have thrived in spite of institutional inertia around matters of race.

Gobar noted that he finds benefits in Jefferson’s intellectual contributions, but argued that they must be unpacked and contextualized. “If you were to consult Thomas Jefferson on the topic of the alt-right, what would his answer be?" Given that Jefferson’s writings describe blacks as “inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind,” Gobar said, the answer would be “unsettling.”

Kenny, the student council president who in her campaign pledged to challenge "good ol’ boy" perceptions of student government, spoke of a need to reinterpret Jeffersonian ideals in the context of equity and inclusion. Rather than letting Jefferson’s narrow vision of citizen leadership—restricted to white, landowning men—constrain the college, she said, the school community ought to apply that legacy in a way that promotes an inclusive campus.

Wellmon, the Germanic studies professor, suggested that what’s at stake isn’t located in the school’s founder, but rather in its role as an institution of higher learning. The intolerance and baseless rhetoric that white supremacists espouse, he said, assaults the intellectual inquiry at the heart of the modern university. “What happened last Friday,” he said, “was a trespass against the practices and values of universities across history and across the world.” As he teaches his first class on Wednesday, he’ll propose reading texts carefully and basing arguments in evidence as a means of resistance against claims of white supremacy.

UVA maintains a strong tradition of student self-governance, which grants students an unusual degree of responsibility for tasks typically reserved for administrators, like upholding the school’s storied Honor Code and adjudicating disciplinary cases. In this structure, whatever changes students want to see in their new school year have to come from them.

Kenny finds the tradition of student governance empowering, especially at a time when the university community is divided on the administration’s response to last week’s violence. For students like Evelyn Wang, a current UVA senior studying commerce and women, gender, and sexuality studies, however, the opportunity to assert big changes can feel more like a burden, especially as students balance a demanding new year with raw emotions. “There are a lot of students feeling fatigue here regarding the expectations on us to be doing something about the violence, the onus always being on us to be fighting for it,” she said. Then, there’s the complicating factor of student turnover, which Wang said weakens momentum for student-driven initiatives. “A lot of us are fourth-years, and we're going to be gone after this year,” Wang said. “That kind of institutional memory is so hard to retain year after year with students.”