EDITORIAL: Living on the Lawn should be a genuine privilege
By Editorial Board | 6 days agoThe simple fact is that living on the Lawn is supposed to be a privilege but increasingly seems to be an inconvenience.
The simple fact is that living on the Lawn is supposed to be a privilege but increasingly seems to be an inconvenience.
Especially in a university such as our own which proudly lauds our tradition of student self-governance, explicit statements from institutional representatives on contemporary issues can dangerously limit discourses.
We must begin to consider that the current culture of affluence on Grounds may be equally as prohibitive to FGLI students as inaccessible application processes.
Melting down the statue to repurpose its metal signifies the capacity we have as a community to communicate our values and continue moving history forward.
Students should not have to be forced to jeopardize both their learning opportunities and those of their peers due to their economic situations and the rigidity of the Thanksgiving Break schedule.
Emotions — grief, fear, shock, anger — will always be a part of understanding violence and should not be bracketed so much as enriched by contextualization and solution-oriented mindsets.
The University is more than just a place of learning, it is a home to north of 20,000 young adults — for many of us, we just don’t feel safe in our homes anymore.
We write this editorial not to minimize or disparage its efforts but rather to call on our representatives to adequately harness the wide range of opportunities this new system affords to them.
As we see the coronavirus step back into the limelight — for what feels like the one-thousandth time — the University must take the necessary steps to ensure that all students have access to the resources they need to succeed.
It isn’t bad enough that Gov. Youngkin is crafting meaningless mandates, he is also forcing the University to act as the enforcement arm of his intrusive, big-government regime.
It is incumbent upon our administrators to do everything in their power to ensure that the University continues to look and feel like the Commonwealth that it was designed to serve.
For better or for worse, AI is here. The University should utilize it to ensure that students are learning the most relevant skills in the most applicable way.
If we default on our responsibility to be careful stewards of the tradition of self-governance, we leave room for faculty and administrators to undercut the agency that students at the University have had for generations.
What was once a system steeped in the dogmatic pursuit of a narrowly conceived ideal will be a holistic process that confronts nuance to uplift a community, not punish individuals.
We are not fooled by these foundations’ attempts at misconstruing community reclamation into destruction as a means of preserving Confederate ideology.