http://hamptonroads.com/2008/02/who-owns-william-and-mary
Who owns William and Mary?
YOU CAN CLAIM victory today all you like. But you are alumni, and though the college appreciates the checks you write, William and Mary doesn’t belong to you.
You don’t own the college like the students who spend every day in the classrooms and on the lawns. Not like the faculty and staff who work there. Not like the parents of kids who attend. You don’t even own it like you did when you were young and watched the alumni during homecoming and thought you would never get that old.
I bring all this up because many of my fellow alumni have been, since the beginning of his tenure, in full green and gold umbrage at the conduct of President Gene Nichol, who quit this week rather than be fired this summer. Wildly over-represented in political circles, alums literally forced Nichol out by the sheer weight of their outrage and offense at his liberal politics.
The president, of course, provided them with ample reason for outrage. He yanked the cross from the Wren Chapel. That was ridiculous. The school lost donations, but no president should run a campus based on what brings in the most dough. Then he permitted sex workers to come and put on a show. Given that students sponsored it, I’m not sure it was his place to say no, even if alums stamped their feet.
But then the General Assembly got in the act. Members of the college’s governing board were frog-marched before a House committee last week, a scene far more insulting to the university than the removal of a cross or the presence of a prostitute on campus.
“If any president of a college has put Virginia in a bad light, it’s Mr. Nichol,” spake Del. Jeffrey Frederick, who — according to his bio — graduated from Emory University in Atlanta. “Perhaps we should reconsider Mr. Nichol’s tenure.”
They no doubt do things differently in Georgia, but here in Virginia the responsibility for firing a college president rests not with a striving delegate, but with the school’s Board of Visitors, which was left with no choice.
Down this path, lit by the flames of Frederick and his friends, is repulsive political correctness of a distinctly cowering kind. It ends at a presidential office that only a politician is fit to fill.
If alums don’t see that, they’re trodding this path with eyes firmly shut. Worse, they don’t love William and Mary, at least the school they actually attended. Perhaps they love some simulacrum — all perfect sunsets at Crim Dell— but they can’t love the school and its hurly-burly.
The real one, may I remind my brothers and sisters, allowed the screening of extremely naughty movies to thousands of students as part of a movie series. The real one featured a fraternity of louts so drunken that they lit a float on fire in the middle of the homecoming parade. The real William and Mary once held a ball so debauched that people traveled from other states to attend.
That’s the kind of stuff that happens on a campus, along with learning and love, and despite a president’s best efforts. It’s part of going to college, and it’s part of growing up.
Several of the people who led the inquisition against Nichol attended those movies and went to that ball, or wish they had. They may have changed plenty in the intervening years and probably disapprove of and regret such behavior. But we carry all that with us, too. It’s part of growing up.
The trick is to get older without getting old, to become an adult without becoming a scold. I’d like to think that my own college behavior (and I have more to regret than many), along with the judicious application of a family I don’t deserve and the passing of plenty of years, molded me into the man I am now, a far better person than the kid I was 24 years ago.
It no doubt has made me a proud and protective alumnus, whose only responsibilities are to be ever-after grateful to the place that birthed me, to write a check when I can and to help lift up the people trying now to survive four years in Williamsburg.
But I no longer own the college. And neither do you.
Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com [1]. Find his columns, and comment on them, at donald-luzzatto.blogspot.com.