chained to the basement furnace.” In April of the same year, a nineteen-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped in a Lawn room. She was brought there by a date just before two in the morning; she emerged, dazed and beaten, at ten A.M.
The girl, who was from a well-connected family, went to her parents soon afterward. Her parents went directly to Colgate Darden, UVA’s president at the time. Darden expelled or suspended all twelve men who were involved in the gang rape, a move that provoked widespread anger on campus. Three of the accused wrote a letter to the Cav Daily saying that they were “charged only with a failure to put a halt to the actions of others.” Darden stuck to his convictions, and the students rose up, submitting a sixteen-page formal complaint to the university. A hundred men showed up at a faculty meeting to protest. Soon afterward, students lobbied to change the structure of the university’s government. They formed a student judiciary committee that would, the Cav Daily noted, “return the disciplinary power of the President’s Office to the student body with a machinery vastly different from that of previous years.” Student self-governance is a Jeffersonian ideal, and it remains one of UVA’s proudest practices. The Office of the Dean of Students lists it first in a line of traditions that make the school a “special place.”
A month after the 1954 gang rape, the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. Harry F. Byrd, the senator who controlled Virginia politics, began promoting the program known as Massive Resistance—a group of laws that would reward students who opposed integration and close any public school that complied. In 1958, Charlottesville closed down its schools for five months rather than admit black students. In 1959, a federal judge overruled this, ordering that nine black students be admitted to Venable Elementary—the school on Fourteenth Street, whose shrieking recess breaks I used to observe with a beer on my roof. My friend Rachel, the one who rode in Jesse Matthew’s cab just before he killed Morgan Harrington, now sends her own daughters to Venable. The girls are twins, gorgeous and funny and brilliant; Andrew and I are their godparents. Some days I feel crazed with hope and certainty that the world they grow up in will be unrecognizably different. And yet, on the day of the Unite the Right rally, David Duke and his band of white supremacists marched right by Rachel’s house.
College towns, which turn over their population every four years, are suffused with a unique and possibly necessary sort of amnesia. If you know the history, you have to remake it, or at least believe that remaking it is possible. You have to believe that there is a reason you are there now, not the people who got it all so wrong before. More likely, though, you feel like you’re the only person who’s ever stepped on campus. Most likely you have no tangible sense of historical wrongdoing. The ugliness, the trauma, of UVA’s past half decade is related to how intensely and consistently the school has tried to suppress the idea that it could ever be ugly or traumatic. (The same is true of America under Trump.) The school’s self-conception will never become completely true until it can admit the extent to which it has always been false: that its fetishized campus was built by slave laborers; that it has, in fact, a long history of gang rape; that Alderman Library, where I spent so many nights writing terrible papers, was named after a staunch eugenicist who, as president of the university, thanked the Ku Klux Klan for a donation with the sign-off “Faithfully yours.”
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Years have elapsed since the Rolling Stone story. Much of what Erdely wanted to achieve with her reporting has, within the past two years, come to pass. The public has been galvanized by sexual assault reporting, riveted by stories of abuse and institutional indifference. I sometimes wonder: if Rolling Stone hadn’t botched this piece in such a spectacular fashion, would the wave that came later have been so relatively impeccable? With the coverage of the accusations against Bill Cosby, starting with New York’s groundbreaking 2015 cover, and with the Harvey Weinstein story and everything that followed, reporters avoided presenting any single woman or experience as broadly representative. They demanded a lot of their subjects, and in doing so, strengthened their subjects’ positions. They showed their readers what they, as reporters,