What’s at Stake for UVa?
University president weighs in on the campus’s current racial climate and ongoing efforts to strengthen its multicultural milieu.
By Kendra Hamilton
The following Q&A session with the University of Virginia’s president, Dr. John T. Casteen, follows news reports that the venerable state school, which appeared to have forged a bright multicultural future from its troubled racial past, has been stung in a national string of “blackface” incidents.
The news that three students — one dressed as Uncle Sam with an Afro wig, the others dressed as Venus and Serena Williams — had donned black face paint at a fraternity Halloween party was made public in late November, prompting a stern warning from Casteen.
“Human dignity, decency, mutual respect and understandings informed by a genuine knowledge of history … belong to all of us, not just to the students affected,” he wrote in the Nov. 22 statement. “Efforts to make this university an authentic cross-section of what we are as a country and progress made toward this goal are too important to be cast aside by the careless acts of a few.”
