The Cavalier Daily
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The doors of perception

The Board of Visitors did the public a disservice by not allowing student into its meeting

As Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the papers. I hope I will read a lot more about students, alumni and faculty being turned away from last week’s Board of Visitors meeting. The Board has been an interesting group these past few months. Since a cadre within the Board engineered the resignation of the University’s president, the Board has reinstated the president, voted to extend the president’s contract, seen two of its members resign and read that one of those resigning members told a national newspaper that no one ever intended for the president to be at the University very long. It has stirred up a controversy that has the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools looking into whether the University meets the association’s requirements for accreditation. The Board keeps running into — and apparently ignoring — a controversy over whether the Board member who seems to have worked hardest to oust the president should join her colleagues who have retired from the Board. Now, it seems, the Board has violated the spirit and possibly the letter of Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.

The Board, serving at a public university, is a public body. Its meetings are required by law to be public. That requires letting the public into those meetings — even if some members of the public are holding signs that express opinions contrary to the Board’s thinking or disruptive of the Board’s comfort.

The Cavalier Daily and several other local media outlets covered the event and while they differed on some particulars — were there 20 people in the crowd or 40? — accounts seem to agree on the basic story. A group called Hoos University gathered outside the Board’s meeting.

Most of that group was denied entrance. Officials from the University threatened students with expulsion and arrest if they did not disperse. This happened even though there seemed to be plenty of space available in the meeting room, which — according to more than one account — can safely hold about 300 people. According to some accounts, other people were allowed in and out of the meeting while Hoos University members and supporters were kept outside.

What would the University’s founder think? That is impossible to say with certainty. Thomas Jefferson was a complicated and sometimes contradictory person who’s been lying — or perhaps rolling over — in his grave for a long time now. But Jefferson did write of the University, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Some will say — and a University spokesman has said — that Hoos University made its point even though many of the people who wanted to enter the Board meeting were denied that right.

“They did their demonstration and they made their points,” University spokesperson McGregor McCance told The Cavalier Daily. “That communication has been received.”

Perhaps. But those points were certainly less plainly and less forcefully made — and therefore easier to ignore — than they could have been.

Years ago, I covered the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors. At a meeting on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, the board was discussing tuition increases. A large crowd of students — hundreds, if memory serves — marched to the meeting. Many of them lined the walls of the meeting room holding signs expressing their opinions. Protestors who did not fit in the meeting space stood in the hallway outside the room and on the sidewalk outside the building.

I believe there were some campus police officers at the meeting, but the ratio was not anything like the 18 officers to 20 protestors some outlets reported at last Thursday’s protest. I am sure it was not terribly pleasant for the Board of Governors to conduct business that way, but it managed. Perhaps UNC’s board members agreed with Jefferson when he wrote, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

I believe the chairman of the board addressed the protestors during the meeting, expressing appreciation for their love of the university that brought them to the meeting. I am sure board members commented on the protestors and their concerns when members of the press asked about them. The University, by contrast, seems to be responding through professional spokespeople. There is nothing inherently wrong with paid professionals speaking for the University. That is what they get paid for, after all. But they are not the people who make policy and they are not the people who created this controversy. The media — particularly The Cavalier Daily — should not let last Thursday’s events be a one-day story.

Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily.

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