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Dispatches from the present

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A Steady Hand

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Situated at the intersection of academic buildings, campus ministries and several fraternity and sorority houses, Beta Bridge is an unusual site for University of Virginia students to exercise their freedom of expression. But since the 1970s, that’s exactly what they’ve done, painting messages as varied as “apply to write for the Cavalier Daily” to “vote YES on Referendum 1” on the bridge’s peeling layers. As tradition dictates, every missive stays on the bridge for at least a day before other students paint over it, often anonymously and sometimes controversially.

At the time of writing, the bridge’s longest-lasting message read “UVA Strong” alongside the numbers 1, 15 and 41. With a few exceptions, the community sought to preserve this memorial to the three UVA students murdered in an act of gun violence in November 2022. But in the early hours of Tuesday, May 7th, someone defaced it. What once read “UVA Strong” was now covered in dripping red letters: “GENOCIDE JIM.”

Just three days prior, on Saturday, May 4th, university president Jim Ryan had called upon Virginia state troopers to disperse a self-proclaimed encampment for Gaza. This space for nonviolent civil disobedience (its activities were often punctuated by dancing) transformed within minutes, as university alert systems warned students to avoid the area before declaring the encampment an unlawful assembly. In the coming hours, countless photographs and videos would begin to circulate: of police armed with machine guns ambling past student residences (mine included), of those same police spraying protesters with chemical irritants before tackling and zip-tying many of them, of students otherwise uninvolved in the protest attempting to provide medical aid to their peers.

By the administration’s account, this deployment of force was the result of protesters’ refusal to comply with a no-tent policy and subsequent—albeit isolated—acts of violence committed against university police (facts disputed by students present at the event). Moreover, in official communications describing the events of that day, the fateful decisions made by Ryan and his administration were necessary to maintain the “neutral and even-handed enforcement” of university policies, including those associated with the UVA’s commitment to “free expression.”

Watching the events unfold again and again on my phone and replaying them in conversations with my neighbors, however, I cannot help but wonder where free expression—or any expression, for that matter—fits into the school’s decision to authorize state violence against its students. On the same day that he was christened “Genocide Jim,” Ryan convened a virtual town hall to discuss the events of May 4th and field questions from the university community—though only a select few, and then only those submitted by attendees who had registered for the event ahead of time. Listening to university administrators attempt to justify their actions—and absence—in my residence, just steps away from the site of the encampment, I was struck by the utter anonymity of the affair. Is it really a town hall if those on high don’t have to face the town? Is it really a space for voices to be heard if the only voices speaking are those of the institution that exposed its students to violence in the first place?

Before May 4th, I was sure that the violent encounters taking place at other universities simply couldn’t happen at UVA. In February, students had passed a referendum to divest from entities that support Israel, and word spread that student organizers weren’t planning a days-long encampment because of that fact. Even more significantly, though, I believed that we students knew Jim Ryan, that the countless “Runs with Jim” and days in which he opened his home to students—most notably in the weeks following the school shooting—signaled a relationship between this university president and his community that was fundamentally different from those at other institutions. At a personal level, Ryan was the smiling face that welcomed me to Virginia, the face that divulged his life story to me and a host of like-minded eighteen-year-olds to convince us that we, too, could attend the university on a scholarship and that we, too, could thrive within it. Surely that same face wouldn’t authorize the use of police force against the very community that lost three students to an act of gun violence just over a year ago. Surely his conscience would weigh heavily with the memory of white supremacists chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans in this space almost eight years ago, and with the knowledge that his predecessor hadn’t called upon police to stop them (a fact many students have been quick to point out). Surely things would be different here.

But 538 days after the deaths of Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry, and 2,458 days after the Unite the Right rally marched through campus, Ryan proved me wrong. In hindsight, my perspective may seem naïve, but I was not alone in voicing it. To many students, UVA is unique among universities of a similar academic caliber precisely because of its emphasis on self-expression and self-governance—an emphasis Ryan reiterated in his email to students immediately following the events, in which he cited the university’s Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry and named freedom of speech as a “bedrock University value.” To many student activists, however, this focus on expressive rights occludes a much more urgent concern: the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In either case, the violent suppression of peaceful protests represents a betrayal on both fronts, signaling the university’s unwillingness to engage with forms of expression that prove disruptive and its inability to tolerate political acts that challenge the institution’s traditional governing principles. Of course, this is not to suggest that the protesters made dialogue easy. After all, it’s true that the encampment violated a university policy, and that its members responded to a letter from the administration the day before police were called in with the words: “BULLSHIT. FREE PALESTINE.” But it’s also true that military-grade weapons are disproportionate to tents, that arrests are incompatible with academic flourishing, and that when state troopers donned riot gear against students, Jim Ryan was nowhere to be found.

Walking past Beta Bridge now, I wonder if this is what student efforts at cooperation, conversation and change have come to: spray paint on a bridge, shouting into a void. I attempt to count the days—540, if I’m not mistaken—between when students first painted “UVA Strong” and others disfigured it with “Genocide Jim.” And I note that the words linking the president of a university in central Virginia to accusations of genocide in the Middle East fail to mention his much more complicit counterpart in American government: Joe Biden. But despite their obvious hyperbole, their clear displacement of responsibility, I think that those big red letters must have been written with a remarkably steady—and remarkably disappointed—hand.

Photo credit: Beta Bridge (Almost) Daily