not because this is UVA, although it being UVA makes the blood rush to my face more quickly; no, not because this is my own college, but because this is what happens at campuses all over the US.what seems especially egregious about the UVA situation though is how much the student body itself is part of the problem. in my own experience i’ve never found UVA to be the kind of school with an intellectual feminist edge (can you even see a UVA version of emma sulkowicz doing the same thing in charlottesville? and that the daily progress would even give it more than a few inches in the backpages?) but in most of the reports on other schools the conflict is depicted as that of victim against administration anxious to preserve school reputation and where student solidarity is very much evident. you only have to read what the friends of one UVA victim said when they arrived to “help” her to see the problem.
the other thing that seems especially and shamefully characteristic of UVA is that, while administrations at other schools are scrambling for reputational and legal damage control over the campus rape crisis, i do not sense that UVA’s administration is even responding in a way that implies they acknowledge there is a problem. at the same time, the refusal to engage with media plus the internal gags seem to me especially typical of the irresponsible way the current administration has behaved over many matters in recent years. and all this would not feel so hypocritical if the rhetoric of honour were not trumpeted so much. back when i was still in school i’d heard a similar story that was said to have happened during the casteen era, and i’ve always imagined that this no longer happens, that it was something “in the past”; afterall we’re out of the big bad eighties, we even have a female president now, who should care more about women’s issues, right? if terri sullivan’s phone call in the article is anything to go by, anger and betrayal is all you can reasonably feel towards the school.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird