What UVA Means For Charlottesville

Over the past several days, my better half and I have been talking about what a new UVA could mean for Charlottesville, the city that raised us and that we know so well.

A lot has been, and will continue to be, written about the specifics of President Jim Ryan’s resignation and the fate of DEI at UVA. This piece is not exactly that.

Rather, this is about the ripple. This is about the what-next? This is about the broader eco-system that UVA sits within. This is about Charlottesville.

For as critical of UVA as I am—it has yet to be de-colonized—right now things are poised to get significantly worse and we need to strategize. We are approaching a series of critical inflection points that carry existential stakes—for students, yes, but in even more real ways, for those of us who don’t leave every summer.

As someone who lives with historical documents, accounts, and narratives—I find this notion of “town” and “gown” both true and absurd. It is truest when we look at the patterns of UVA’s extraction and who benefits—and it is most absurd when we see just how undeniably connected we all are.

We may not rise together, but we most certainly fall together. As with any fall, the hardest hit will be those who are always hardest hit. And make no mistake, I know there is a tremendous amount of fight and resistance left in Charlottesville, and Virginia as a whole.

Some will read this and say it is “sky is falling” framing—and to those I say, “I hope we are wrong.” But think about the last six months of this administration, and just how much has been done in such a short period of time.

Think about the impact a new UVA president, combined with the Board of Visitors, could have on the community not just inside the boundaries of the university, but across Central Virginia.

Think about this:

1. Under the guise of “safety,” fear and policing take deeper root as UVA police expands its reach farther into Black neighborhoods. Kids face daily trauma and surveillance, while the unhoused, addicted, and marginalized are incarcerated.

2. Law clinics at UVA Law School disappear, having once served vulnerable tenants, undocumented immigrants, low-income workers, and the wrongfully accused.

3. Health services and clinics that prioritize low-wage and low-income residents are slashed and discontinued.

4. UVA shifts even more funding to hire workers through corporate and private entities, freezing cost of living adjustments for thousands of low-wage workers, while targeting and fighting unionization efforts, and stripping health and other benefits.

5. “Affordable” housing partnerships, reparative justice initiatives, and community grants are discontinued. UVA disengages from communities harmed by its past and present development practices. Land use decisions and expansion plans proceed with no community input.

6. UVA invests even more into its real estate strategy, buying up more land in historically Black neighborhoods, while waging national campaigns to attract biotech firms, and upper-income luxury housing, tapping its $14.2 billion endowment when needed.

7. The arrival of tech and biotech companies spurs more new high-income developments in and around historically Black neighborhoods. As more outside capital floods in, vulnerable communities face rising rents and more difficulty accessing even fewer resources and opportunities.

8. Black and progressive faculty leave UVA, causing a brain-drain that weakens activism, reshapes neighborhoods, and harms local schools, small businesses, and cultural life—fracturing the town/gown alliance and diminishing the strength of resistance.

9. UVA prioritizes hiring new conservative faculty and staff. As they move to Charlottesville and Albemarle they sit on government boards, run for office, and become major donors of efforts that deny systemic racism and equity-driven efforts to repair past harms.

10. As more conservative faculty move here, displacement is further fueled, driving up the cost of housing, and replacing any remaining community-centered developments with upper-income luxury developments and businesses that cater to their residents.

11. With this entrenchment, the next reparative and racial justice phase becomes even harder to wage. The longer this ideological shift takes hold, the more normalized it becomes, as new policies operate at baselines of exclusion and inequity.

12. UVA increases its targeting of protests and protesters, enforcing a “civility code” and a strict set of rules around permitting. Faculty allies vanish, while organizers face surveillance, denied space, and police action.

    

13. UVA transit is further restricted to student needs, charging low-wage workers for mandatory buses and shuttles to satellite parking lots, forcing tens of thousands of workers into longer, costlier commutes or unemployment.

    

14. UVA arts programs sever ties with grassroots Black artists and cultural institutions, opting instead to fund and curate shows on “Western Civilization” and “Founding Principles.” The university's public humanities funding prioritizes groups like the Jefferson Council.

15. UVA historians stop working on projects related to racial justice and repair, while city, county, and private schools get pressured by UVA to adopt a “balanced” curricula that espouses racial lies, false narratives of control and power, and right-wing ideologies.

16. Black student enrollment drops as UVA embraces a “colorblind meritocracy,” cutting support for underrepresented students and defunding early outreach programs. Local Black kids grow up with a university that is inaccessible, hostile, and built without them in mind.

    

17. Black graduate students stop applying to come to UVA, and Black faculty departures mean that Black mentors for any remaining students are few. With their absence will come other paradigm shifts outside UVA, such as the economic impact of Black students and faculty supporting local businesses and cultural institutions, withdrawing a major source of financial and solidarity-driven support.