The official word on why UVA suspended the University Guide Service from leading tours to prospective students and their parents is that the group supposedly isn’t able to staff the required number of tours, and that the information provided during the tours isn’t “consistent.”
The real answer is hinted at in the second part, about the tours not being “consistent.
Score another point for Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, who want you to think UVA is too “woke.”
“Student administrative-sanctioned events must have a welcoming script and guides willing to deliver it. However, these tours have degenerated into discourses on slavery, segregation, racism, and the persecution of indigenous peoples. Many students and parents have been turned off and never return,” was the message that Tom Neale, the president of The Jefferson Council, a far-right alumni group, wrote in “An Open Letter to Governor Youngkin: Pick Fighters for the UVA Board,” dated June 28.
In the letter, Neale advised the governor to include among his priorities for his latest round of appointments to the BOV that the appointees be willing and ready to “sever relations with the Student Guides club that provides student and historical tours.”
‘Woke’ UVA
- ‘Wokeness’ critic on UVA Board of Visitors had odd problem with UVA Strong signs
- Senate committee moves to block appointment of ‘wokeness’ critic to UVA Board of Visitors
- Anti-‘Woke’ UVA alum group names first executive director, scaling up operations
- UVA has been overrun by ‘Wokeness,’ according to DEI critic appointed to Board of Visitors
- Youngkin, Ellis leading far-right push to keep the number of Black students at UVA in line
- Bert Ellis offers ‘apology’ for insults of UVA board, administrators revealed in texts
- ‘Wokeness’ critic: ‘White privilege’ is used for division at University of Virginia
This Jefferson Council collection of folks has all manner of tingly feelings for the Guides.
Its website includes a string of missives on the student-run group, among them “Rogue Guides Still a Problem,” “Hiring Guides Who Hate UVA … Not a Good Look,” “’The Worst Tour of the 14 Colleges We Have Been on This Year,” and my favorite, “Want a Woke Version of UVA History? Go on a Student-Guided Tour.”
That last one, authored by James Bacon, the group’s co-founder, and a far-right blogger and author, includes one story of a prospective student who dropped UVA from her list of colleges after a tour that recounted “injustices ranging from the building of UVA on the backs of oppressed slaves to the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally.”
“The young woman was not impressed. If the recitation of left-wing grievances defined the zeitgeist of UVA today, this was not the place for her,” Bacon wrote.
One, her loss – it’s probably fair to assume that UVA wasn’t the place for this possibly apocryphal young lady in the first place, if being confronted with uncomfortable historical reality isn’t her cup of tea.
Two, you can see where this is going, what the grievances are.
As Bacon wrote in his “Woke Version of UVA History” tome, the training for Guides is “laden with the rhetoric of the ‘social justice’ movement,” and he complains that the “leftist framing of historical issues during the training has insinuated itself into many tours.”
“Through their interactions with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of visitors every year, the student guides are forging a negative image of UVA,” Bacon wrote. “The Board has an obligation to ascertain if irreparable damage to the university’s reputation and recruitment is being done.”
It should be against this backdrop that we should now consider the move by the University to suspend the Guides.
Again, the official word, from UVA spokesperson Bethanie Glover, in an email statement to The Cavalier Daily, which first broke the story of the suspension of the University Guide Service, is that the University is working with the group on a “performance improvement plan which will extend through the fall 2024 semester, reviewing the University’s expectations for guide attendance and tour content and delivery.”
Another UVA spokesperson, Brian Coy, noted the guide attendance issue in a statement to The New York Times, telling the Times that some guides had missed appointments, which would be an obvious issue, then reinforcing the performance improvement point that Glover had made, noting that while “(s)ome of the tours have been excellent and comprehensive, others have been found to be in need of work.”
You don’t have to be a UVA alum to be able to read between the lines at what the spokespeople are getting at there when they use phrasing to cast tours being “in need of work.”
The administration is responding to the marching orders from Youngkin’s anti-“woke” BOV appointees, is what’s going on here.
The Guide Service, in a statement to the CD, pushed back against the narrative the school and its anti-“woke” detractors are advancing.
“The justification for these suspensions is based on the Administration’s view that UGS is failing to fulfill its delegated functions, particularly in terms of reliability and tour quality,” the statement reads. “Our own accountability measures – including tour feedback solicited from all admissions tour visitors – suggest that this is an incomplete view of our tours.”
In the interim, between now and whenever it is that the Guides get back from the anti-“woke” re-education camp, student interns employed by the Office of Admission will be conducting admissions tours for prospective students and their families.
Hooray.
Last word here goes to Neale, in a comment to the Times:
“We’ve gotten hundreds of emails, calls and texts from prospective parents saying, ‘I’m so turned off that my kid is not going to Virginia.’”
Hundreds, no doubt.
“We’re not antediluvian right-wing zealots,” Neale said. “If we can get balanced tours, which is your first blush for many coming to UVA, that’s all we want.”
I’d said I’d give Neale the last word, but, interesting word choice there, “antediluvian.”
The first definition for “antediluvian” per Merriam-Webster is “of or relating to the period before the flood described in the Bible.”
Maybe not the Bible, but perhaps … 1974?
Video: UVA is too ‘woke’
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Chris Graham
