Aside from Lawn rooms, which are inaccessible to the majority of University students, there are few spaces that students occupy on the Lawn. Each pavilion except for Pavilion VII houses a faculty resident, consistent with Thomas Jefferson’s plan for students to live among faculty members. Faculty residence in the Lawn pavilions greatly limits the amount of space students can access on the Lawn, which contributes to what I perceive to be a general lack of student participation on the Lawn. A radical solution to the Lawn’s lack of student space would be to discontinue faculty residence in pavilions as Jefferson intended and instead introduce student spaces to each pavilion.
Over the years, our community has departed from the Jeffersonian vision of the “academical village” as a space that engenders student-faculty interaction through a shared living experience. At the University’s inception, all students lived in the Lawn rooms among their professors, enabling the realization of this vision. Today, 54 students are selected to live in each of the rooms on the Lawn, comprising only about 0.03 percent of the undergraduate population. These students communicate with pavilion residents through events facilitated by the Lawn’s senior resident. Such opportunities are not available to the great majority of students, who would be better served by an increase in student space available to all in each pavilion.
Other students meet pavilion residents through courses that they occasionally teach. Last year, former Pavilion II resident Meredith Woo, who served as the dean of the graduate and undergraduate Arts & Sciences schools, taught a COLA class titled How Nations Grow for 18 first-years. Pavilion IV resident and Center for Politics director Larry Sabato taught Introduction to American Politics to students for over three decades. And during community events such as Lighting of the Lawn, many pavilion residents open their homes to students around the University. I remember being able to walk into Pavilion V and enjoy refreshments in the home of Patricia Lampkin, vice president and chief student affairs officer, during last semester’s Lighting of the Lawn. By and large, however, the average student will never in his four years at the University take a class with or speak to a faculty member living in a pavilion. The faculty members living in pavilions do not enrich the student experience nearly as much as they once did — so student spaces should replace faculty residences.
Examples of potential student spaces in pavilions include a center to provide a safe space and resources for students of diverse backgrounds. Currently, the Multicultural Student Center Initiative aims to introduce such a center to Newcomb, but an entire Lawn pavilion would be more appropriate in reforming the image of the Lawn as a racialized space or “plantation,” as many call it. Other potential student spaces include open study spaces, classrooms, student meeting rooms or rooms dedicated to certain student organizations.
Pavilion VII should be the only pavilion to retain its use as a faculty space rather than as a space in which students can study, spend free time and meet with their student organizations. Known as the Colonnade Club, it currently serves as a faculty club with guest rooms and space for faculty meetings, social events and celebrations. It does not house a faculty member as the other pavilions do. Preserving the current purpose of Pavilion VII would allow faculty members to maintain a place on the Lawn while allowing for student spaces in the nine other pavilions.
The ongoing Rotunda renovations aim to expand classroom space and increase access to the Rotunda in an effort to make it into a building students walk into and not past. On a similar note, the pavilions should be open to students rather than faculty members so that the Lawn will be a place that students feel that they own.
Nazar Aljassar is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at n.aljassar@cavalierdaily.com.
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