Thanks for the engaging discussion, Michael! My thoughts are below:

This Friday, September 28th at 5:30 pm, students, faculty, community members, and staff will gather at the Rotunda to protest this summer’s events and to demand greater transparency in University governance. “Transparency Now!” the flyers blare, “This is YOUR University!” We say this sort of thing frequently, both in overtly political situations—in 2003, those opposing the war in Iraq chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” when police arrested them for marching in opposition to US policy—and in more mundane ones. Lovers and friends often dub a favorite restaurant “our place,” a particularly resonant song “our song” (I am reminded of Bernard from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’ lament, “I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use,” a line that surely connotes an intimacy born of habit, yes, but also of a trust in the pluripotent unfolding of a relationship that lacks a clear ending). While these turns of phrase maintain an element of the financial transaction, ownership here evades the economic register: streets are maintained by tax dollars and we paid for those dinners, yes, but possession in these cases proves non-material. Protesters did not fall to the ground with sledgehammers to carve out a piece of the asphalt before being hauled off to jail, and parties at dinner (presumably) don’t demand a share of the tips at the end of the night.

Similarly, for all our talk of the university as a space apart, the language of possession suffuses academics: my dissertation, my class, my paper, my students, my major, our project, our department, our library, our rally. But what do we mean when we claim ownership of these things and why did the Board’s actions this summer serve as an affront to this definition of proprietary rights? In June, Rector Dragas repeatedly invoked the language of value, assuring us that soon we would have the President that we “deserved.” And yet we found this unsatisfactory, insulting, even. While much of the ire invoked by the BOV’s actions can be chalked up to the very real element of subterfuge in Teresa Sullivan’s ousting, I continue to be struck by the logic of means and ends in Dragas’s comments. For her, possession seemed to be about a definite telos: finding a new President or producing Internet-based pedagogical tools. Her actions can therefore be justified by appealing to results and resolutions.

Telos, though, is inimical to the project undertaken at the University. When we study, teach, and work at the University of Virginia, we do so knowing that it will change. For all of the desire to remain true to the historical vision of Jefferson’s architectural scheme, we recognize that the job of the men and women who maintain the Lawn, for instance, isn’t to arrest time, but rather to grow with time. The grass will be reseeded, the Rotunda repaired, and the hands doing that work will leave a trace of their labor. It may seem indistinguishable, at first, but it is nonetheless present. Their work is not a means to an end, but rather a process, just as the production of a paper or the work of a classroom ultimately is a process without clear boundaries. The class ends, you turn in your paper, but you hopefully don’t stop thinking. The value, the ownership, here is never about conclusions, but rather about turning to a new page or back to an old one.

The fact that this definition of ownership inheres in other contexts—my job, our law firm—is its strength, not its weakness. It demonstrates the degree to which what we do at the University of Virginia impacts and is impacted by the world outside its borders. It also explains what was so disturbing about the Board’s actions this summer. They turned people and the processes that they are a part of into puppets in a grand production that we were never consulted about and which was never explained to us. But that’s not what the University is about. Fundamentally, the university lacks any essentialized end. It is ours because we participate in it, faculty, students, staff, and alumni alike. Please come out on Friday to say so.