I got my degree in American government, but it’s come to my attention recently that the most important things I learned in my four years at UVA actually came from hanging out with my buddies.
This realization comes from a recent email thread with two of my former suitemates from first-year 32 (!) years ago.
One of them mentioned one of our many lost friends from those days, Gerard, the absolute calmest, chillest, whatever person I think I’ll ever know.
The mention of G, as everybody called him, and his roommate, Frank, both African-Americans, triggered my memory to how G and Frank once invited me to have lunch with them at Newcomb Hall.
I’m not sure how it is now, but back then, lunch in Newcomb Hall was still de facto segregated – white kids ate with white kids, black kids ate with black kids.
I didn’t realize that until that day.
And I learned that day a tiny little bit of what it might be like to be the one black person in a sea of white people, because that day, I was the one white person in a sea of black students at lunch.
No book or lecture can teach you that about white privilege.
Another life lesson came as a result of me being assigned a kid named Stefan to be my first-year roommate.
Stefan and I never became friends. He was from Brazil, and was a self-described “citizen of the world” theater major; I was from uber-conservative Augusta County, and I’m sure I came across as quite the hillbilly redneck bumpkin that I probably still am.
So, there was that culture clash, and also, Stefan snored like a freight train, and I had an 8 a.m. French class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Anyway, he would come out as a second-year, though it was already obvious to the rest of the guys in our suite – 10 guys, two to a room, five rooms.
I saw daily what he had to face. Crude messages were left on our dry-erase board often enough for me to decide to just take it down. And we’d get prank calls from guys asking to meet him in a bathroom in Cabell Hall that irritated me so much that I actually called the police and filed a report.
One of my former roomies shared a link to a webpage for Stefan that shows he is doing quite well for himself in the theater world, which gives me joy to know.
What he did for me was make me a lifelong LGBTQ+ ally, so, thanks there.
Again, not going to learn that in a classroom.
Other things that come to mind: my circle of friends included people who would go on to become engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, writers.
I met and got to know people from all over the country, the globe.
And I guess I didn’t realize this until my buddies and I started trading emails over the weekend to reminisce, but … I carry a piece of all of those people that I got to know back then with me.
The stuff I learned in the classroom was no doubt important in terms of giving me an intellectual foundation.
What I learned in the dorms, trudging up and down Rugby Road, cutting down a tree one early December night on Observatory Hill – somebody actually brought a saw with them, which I wish I could say I would have thought of – that gave me my moral compass.
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Chris Graham
