UVA Tried To Shut Down Its Historical Tours Discussing Slavery. These Students Resisted.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
For decades, the University of Virginia relied on the student-run group, University Guide Services (UGS), to lead admissions and historical tours on campus. That changed earlier this year when the university ended the group's special status designation. UGS leaders saw the move as part of a larger crackdown on history and truth-telling that is happening across the nation. Now, with the support of the student body, student guides are doubling down on their commitment to share their campus' history.
UGS has led campus tours for UVA since the 1950s. Starting in the '90s, the group expanded the scope to include the more difficult parts of UVA's history. The tours mostly covered student life, but also the Unite the Right rally in 2017, in which neo-Nazis with tiki torches marched through the campus, and how enslaved workers built the school. The decision to include these topics caused an uproar from the Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni group. The council's website features blog posts critiquing UGS dating back to 2022. Posts often center alumni's negative experience with tours, claiming that guides hate UVA and that tours are 'part of a conscious strategy that weeds out conservative voices and reinforces a conformist, intellectual monoculture.'
'When I'm giving a tour and I'm critiquing something from the past, it comes from a place where I want people to understand where this university came from so that we can be better in the future,' Jack Giese, UGS co-chair, told Teen Vogue. 'We are not a group walking around grounds trying to make people hate UVA. We want people to understand where we came from.'
Jack Giese
Until recently, UGS was designated a Special Status Organization (SSO), which allowed it to host tours on behalf of the school and provided unique access to funding and office space. That special relationship between UGS and UVA began to fray in 2024, ostensibly due to issues with guide 'reliability and tour quality.' Over the summer, the university suspended UGS's special status, with promises to collaborate on a 'performance improvement plan.' Guides said that while they were surprised by the suspension, they continued to work with the university to find a solution. Ultimately, the two groups reached an impasse.
Group leaders told Teen Vogue that the administration's reliability concerns focused on admissions tours, but the suspension needlessly prevented them from giving historical tours as well. While UVA interns continued admissions tours, the administration collaborated with UGS to map out a self-guided historical tour for visitors, but offered no assurances that it would not ultimately be used as a replacement for in-person tours. On the admissions side, the improvement plan included training that UGS told Teen Vogue felt redundant, given that they already had a semester-long training in place. They also claim the administration began to critique their tour outlines, including historical content. With no end to the negotiations in sight, UGS decided to resume historical tours in January 2025 without university approval.
'We had a hunch that they were just going to terminate the SSO agreement anyway,' UGS vice chair Ella Sher told Teen Vogue. 'We needed to start building up that infrastructure again so that we could give more consistent tours in the spring and also in the following years.'
That hunch proved correct. In late February, the administration officially terminated its relationship with UGS, noting the 'limited results' of the negotiations. In a statement to the student newspaper The Cavalier Daily, Stephen Farmer, vice provost for enrollment, noted that only 15 guides had completed the administration's training plan. UGS leaders say the group has about 70 members. A University of Virginia spokesperson did not respond to Teen Vogue's multiple requests for an interview.
Sher, Giese, and fellow co-chair Davis Taliafero suspect that there are deeper reasons why the SSO agreement was severed. In an open letter from December 2024 announcing their decision to move forward with their own independent historical tours, they wrote, 'We can only see this suspension as a reaction to the anti-history voices who have long been attacking our organization.'
Jack Giese
Though they don't mention the Jefferson Council by name in their letter, according to The College Fix, a right-wing education news site, the council claimed responsibility for UGS's suspension. An article quoted council cofounder, Thomas Neale, admitting, 'This [suspension] was 100% due…to us.' In some of its blog posts, the council highlights the administration's connections to UGS, advocating that UVA cut ties. 'Let the student guides find their own audience for their tours…if they can,' wrote James A. Bacon, a member of the council's advisory board, in November 2023.
Another of Bacon's posts claimed the backlash against guides was spearheaded by council cofounder and a former member of UVA's board of visitors, Bert Ellis. As one of his last acts on the board, Ellis voted to dismantle UVA's office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The resolution passed unanimously in early March and cited Donald Trump's executive order requiring federally funded schools to eliminate DEI efforts. The executive order is just one of Trump's efforts to politicize funding in higher education. Speaking with The Daily Progress about the vote, Ellis said, 'Every aspect of DEI is to be ripped out, shredded, and terminated.'
From the beginning, Ellis's tenure on the board was mired in controversy. UVA students protested his appointment in 2022 due to his political views. As a student in the 1970s, Ellis invited eugenicist William Shockley to a campus debate. In 2020, Ellis also caused a stir by attempting to forcibly remove a protest sign from a student's door. On March 26, Ellis was removed from the board by Governor Glenn Youngkin, who wrote that Ellis violated the board's code of conduct, but did not provide further details.
'What's frustrating is that we see a lot of fear right now within colleges and administrators who are not necessarily willing to speak up for students,' Taliafero told Teen Vogue. 'And I think if they were, our outcome would've been a whole lot different.' (Teen Vogue reached out to Ellis for comment.)
UVA has remained adamant that the suspension of UGS had nothing to do with its tour content. In a statement about the suspension posted to UVAToday, a spokesperson wrote that UGS's status was suspended because 'it was clear to us that the guide service needed time to improve its reliability and consistency.' The post does mention that the university 'asked the guide service to respond constructively to the persistent (if intermittent) complaints about what a wide variety of guests have described as excessive negativity.'
According to UGS's data, their tours have received mostly positive reviews with only rare complaints about historical content. Taliafero says the administration's concerns about guide reliability, however, are not unfounded. In early February 2024, an error underestimated the number of people scheduled to attend a tour. Where previous guide no-shows just resulted in larger tour groups, this time, people who wanted to take a tour were turned away. The incident became a major focal point in the guides' discussions with the administration. Still, Giese said, a suspension seemed to be out of proportion to the problem. 'Personally, if I were an administrator and I had an issue with [tour size]...my response would not have been, I'm going to suspend the organization and probably decrease dramatically the number of people who are available to give tours,' he said.
Undeterred by the SSO termination, UGS continues to give historical tours. They intend to carry on as a student group with overwhelming support from their peers. During campus elections in early March, a referendum on the ballot condemning the UGS suspension passed with 80% of the vote. (The referendum was written prior to the SSO termination.) While some students are understandably anxious, UGS chairs say that the events of the past year have motivated students to join their group. 'History tells you about how people in the past stood up to things like this," Taliafero said. "So I think when we look at history, we can find a lot of inspiration to continue the work that we're doing.'
Allie Kim
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage?
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Politico
14 hours ago
- Politico
Lindsey Graham sees Israel taking Gaza by force to wrap up war
Graham's comments come as the humanitarian situation in Gaza has reached crisis levels. Roughly a quarter of the exclave's population is facing famine-like conditions, a U.N. World Food Programme official said last Monday. Democrats, international partners and even podcaster and comedian Theo Von are imploring both the U.S. and Israel to substantially increase the flow of aid into Gaza. Israel's military on Sunday paused fighting in three major population centers inside Gaza to increase the delivery of humanitarian aid. Airdrops of aid have also resumed in the area. 'Israel is going to work with the U.N., the World Food Programme, to get some food into these people, who need it,' Graham told Welker. But even against that backdrop, the likelihood of a negotiated peace appears murky. The White House exited diplomatic talks with Hamas last week, with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff concluding that the U.S.-designated terrorist group 'does not appear to be coordinated or acting in good faith.' 'I think they want to die,' Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday. Israel occupied Gaza, which had been an Egyptian territory, in the 6-Day War of 1967, and it had retained forces there until June 2005; since then it has periodically sent forces into the territory in response to incursions from Hamas or to prevent them. Graham said he agreed with the president that talks with the militant group Hamas were futile. 'I think President Trump has come to believe, and I've certainly come to believe, there's no way you're going to negotiate an end of this war with Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization who is chartered to destroy the state of Israel,' he told Welker. 'They're religious Nazis.'
Axios
21 hours ago
- Axios
AI's global race in the dark
The U.S.'s great AI race with China, now freshly embraced by President Trump, is a competition in the dark with no clear prize or finish line. Why it matters: Similar "races" of the past — like the nuclear arms race and the space race — have sparked innovation, but victories haven't lasted long or meant much. The big picture: Both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government now agree that we must invest untold billions to build supporting infrastructure for an error-prone, energy-hungry technology with an unproven business model and an unpredictable impact on the economy and jobs. What they're saying:"America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it," Trump said at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race." Policy experts and industry leaders who promote the "race" idea argue that the U.S. and China are in a head-to-head competition to win the future of AI by achieving research breakthroughs, establishing the technology's standards and breaking the AGI or "superintelligence" barrier. They suggest that the world faces a binary choice between free, U.S.-developed AI imbued with democratic values or a Chinese alternative that's under the thumb of the Communist Party. Flashback: The last time a scientific race had truly world-shaping consequences was during the Second World War, as the Manhattan Project beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. But Germany surrendered well before the U.S. had revealed or made use of its discovery. The nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that followed was a decades-long stalemate that cost fortunes and more than once left the planet teetering on an apocalyptic brink. The 1960s space race was similarly inconclusive. Russia got humanity into space ahead of the U.S., but the U.S. made it to the moon first. Once that leg of the race was over, both countries retreated from further human exploration of space for decades. State of play: With AI, U.S. leaders are once again saying the race is on — but this time the scorecard is even murkier. "Build a bomb before Hitler" or "Put a man on the moon" are comprehensible objectives, but no one is providing similar clarity for the AI competition. The best the industry can say is that we are racing toward AI that's smarter than people. But no two companies or experts have the same definition of "smart" — for humans or AI models. We can't even say with confidence which of any two AI models is "smarter" right now, because we lack good measures and we don't always know or agree on what we want the technology to do. Between the lines: The "beat China" drumbeat is coming largely from inside the industry, which now has a direct line to the White House via Trump's AI adviser, David Sacks. "Whoever ends up winning ends up building the AI rails for the world," OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said at an Axios event in March. Arguing for controls on U.S. chip exports to China earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described competitor DeepSeek as "beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the U.S. in AI." Yes, but: In the era of the second Trump administration, many Americans view their own government as increasingly authoritarian. With Trump himself getting into the business of dictating the political slant of AI products, it's harder for America's champions to sell U.S. alternatives as more "free." China has been catching up to the U.S. in AI research and development, most tech experts agree. They see the U.S. maintaining a shrinking lead of at most a couple of years and perhaps as little as months. But this edge is largely meaningless, since innovations propagate broadly and quickly in the AI industry. And cultural and language differences mean that the U.S. and its allies will never just switch over to Chinese suppliers even if their AI outruns the U.S. competition. In this, AI is more like social media than like steel, solar panels or other fungible goods. The bottom line: The U.S. and China are both going to have increasingly advanced AI in coming years. The race between them is more a convenient fiction that marshals money and minds than a real conflict with an outcome that matters.
UPI
3 days ago
- UPI
On This Day, July 25: Air France Concorde jet crashes, killing 113
July 25 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1909, French pioneer aviator Louis Bleriot became the first person to fly a "heavier-than-air machine" across the English Channel. It took him 36 minutes. In 1917, Mata Hari was sentenced to death in France as a spy for Germany in World War I. She was executed by firing squad less than three months later and her name became a synonym for a seductive female spy. In 1934, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by Nazis during a failed coup attempt. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing U.S. commonwealth. In 1956, the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria and Swedish liner Stockholm collided at night in heavy fog off Nantucket, Mass. The accident had a death toll of 52. Hundreds of people were rescued. The Andrea Doria sank the next morning. In 1965, folk legend Bob Dylan performed for the first time with electric instruments, so upsetting his fans that they booed him. UPI File Photo In 1978, the world's first "test-tube" baby, Louise Brown, was born in Oldham, England. In 1986, former Navy radioman Jerry Whitworth was convicted of selling U.S. military secrets to the Soviets through the John Walker spy ring. The government called it the most damaging espionage case since World War II. Whitworth was sentenced to 365 years in prison. In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein signed a declaration that ended the 46-year state of war between their countries. In 2000, an Air France Concorde supersonic jet crashed on takeoff from Paris, killing 113 people, including four on the ground. It was the first crash of a Concorde. UPI File Photo In 2007, as Iraqis celebrated their national soccer team's victory over South Korea in the Asian Cup semifinals, two suicide bombers attacked crowds in Baghdad, killing at least 50 people and injuring about 140. In 2008, California banned the use of trans fats in all restaurants and retail bakeries in the state, beginning in 2010. In 2012, North Korea announced its leader, Kim Jong Un, had married Ri Sol Ju. In 2019, U.S. Attorney General William Barr ordered the federal Bureau of Prisons to resume capital punishment 16 years after the last federal execution. After a yearlong series of court battles, the government carried out its first execution July 14, 2020, on Daniel Lewis Lee. In 2023, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating three national memorials for civil rights icon Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley -- one at Graball Landing in Mississippi, where Till's body was discovered in 1955; one at the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where those who killed him were acquitted; and one at the Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, Ill., where his funeral was held. In 2024, rock 'n' roll legend Billy Joel ended his 10-year monthly residency at New York's Madison Square Garden, with more than 1.6 million tickets sold and 150 lifetime performances at the arena. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
