At UVA we saw what happens when you mix White supremacy with matters of town-and-gown.
A campus community’s safety can be significantly compromised.
Because most of the violence in Charlottesville was centered around what happened in the city proper and not on campus the night before, the University of Virginia escaped a lot of the early attention in the media.
Yet, in the aftermath, it’s clear, UVA was the staging ground for the entire weekend. The torch-lit march on campus that Friday night was the prelude to the rally in the city the next day.
In the student paper, The Cavalier, Linda Columbus, an associate professor of chemistry and the associate director of the UVA Global Infectious Diseases Institute, was outraged at the university’s lack of preparation.
“I wasn’t warned,” Columbus wrote, implying that students and faculty weren’t adequately informed about a potential threat represented by the white supremacists that were about to march through campus. “What did the university do to protect [students]? Why were we so ill-prepared? Why wasn’t a police alert sent out warning the university community? Why do we still have no information about the attacks on these students?”
