Defending Architectural History
Architectural education and research are under assault in the United States. As the Washington Post reported last month, an incoming member of the University of Virginia’s governing board who was appointed by Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has been speaking out against professor of architectural history, vice provost, and frequent PLATFORM contributor Louis P. Nelson.
In a series of text messages that came to light through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request by a writer in Richmond who shared them with the Post, trustee Bert Ellis voiced contempt for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and admiration for Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the university whose ownership of slaves makes him a polarizing figure on campus and off. Ellis also singled out Nelson, whose purview as vice provost includes community engagement and public service, for his efforts to help the university come to terms with its history of racial subjugation.
“Check out this numnut who . . . has nothing to do but highlight slavery at UVA,” Ellis texted two other nominees for the board last summer, more than six months before the legislature confirmed his appointment. “This bloated bureaucracy has got to be slashed.”
Figure 1. Aerial view of the University of Virginia with the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in the foreground and the the original campus, designed by Thomas Jefferson, just behind it, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Sanjay Suchak, June 15, 2020.
It’s no secret that higher education in the United States, especially public, is a target of the nation’s culture wars. Conservative populists, tapping into an ingrained anti-intellectual tradition, have long viewed colleges and universities, for better or worse (and accurately or not), as proxies for liberalism, making campuses fertile terrain for the airing of right-wing grievances.
Once the province of a small elite, higher education was democratized in the United States in the decades after World War II thanks to widespread, substantial investment by the national government in the form of the U.S. G.I. Bill of 1944 as well as grants for scientific research and development, and by state governments, which rapidly expanded and generously subsidized their two- and four-year public systems.
Alongside this support, however, came surveillance and repression. In the late 1940s, with the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy ascendant, colleges started banning left-wing groups, and cooperated with the FBI and the CIA in their investigations of so-called subversive students, faculty, and staff. Progressives who joined interracial organizations, protested racial discrimination, and demonstrated against lynching were targeted and persecuted. As political pressure mounted, some public universities began to fire tenured faculty for their political views. Other faculty were blacklisted after being called to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other Congressional committees. Then came loyalty oaths, like at the University of California and the State University of New York.
Figure 2. The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at dusk, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Sanjay Suchak, June 15, 2020.
Figure 3. “Memory Marks Names.” Names of slaves etched into the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Sanjay Suchak, June 23, 2020.
As white resentment toward the Civil Rights movement and, later, the counterculture mounted in the 1960s, higher ed became a frequent target again. When he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan famously condemned U.C. Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. By the ‘70s, debate roiled coast to coast around affirmative action in admissions. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, squabbles over the canon, and, in particular, the curriculum of history and literature courses, spilled into public view. In the 2000s, President George W. Bush made hay of the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.
In the past decade, with the proliferation of partisan mass media, attacks have become yet more vocal, frequent, and all-encompassing. Right-wing pundits accelerated their claims that public colleges favor left-wing causes and silence free speech by refusing to invite polarizing (conservative) voices to campus. Vigilantes published websites such as the Professor Watchlist (“unmasking radical professors”) to intimidate faculty. Today, as Brendan Cantwell and Barrett J. Taylor write in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “the very idea of public colleges and universities that operate independent of partisan control is under attack.”
In 2021, Georgia lawmakers “eviscerated” tenure, transferring power over decisions from the state university system’s twenty-six campuses to a central body of political appointees. In Florida, the flagship public university barred faculty from testifying in a lawsuit challenging a voting-restriction law. Earlier this year, Governor-cum-likely U.S. presidential candidate Ron DeSantis replaced nearly half the board of trustees of New College of Florida in order to transform it from a progressive liberal arts campus into a bastion of conservatism. Already the board has replaced the college’s president and abolished its DEI office. Seemingly at the prodding of DeSantis and his colleagues, antiracist content was deleted from the proposed Advanced Placement high school course (which can confer college credit) in African American Studies. Curriculum—a treasured prerogative of faculty—is under attack too.
History is on the line. Architectural historians are on the line. The physical traces of oppression are still present in constructed environments, and our research renders them legible.
At UVA, Nelson has been a force for transparency, justice, and innovative architectural history. He insists it takes courage to face the truth, which is precisely what the United States must do to fulfill its democratic promise. He is fortunate to be surrounded with colleagues who support him and his projects. After the horrific descent of hate groups on Charlottesville in 2017, Nelson and his colleagues collaborated to expose the history of chattel slavery at the university, publishing their findings in two edited volumes, Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequality and Education in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University. They show the past to be very much part of the present, embedded in the architecture and landscape of the campus, just as it is for that of the state, region, and larger transatlantic world.
“History is on the line. Architectural historians are on the line.”
Figure 4. Members of the University of Virginia community at a White Coats for Black Lives event at the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 15, 2020. Photograph by Sanjay Suchak.
Nelson continued to explore the impact of slavery in his service work, including as a member of the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, which helped realize the college’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, designed by Höwler + Yoon, Mabel O. Wilson, Gregg Bleam, Frank Dukes, and Eto Otitigbe, completed in 2020.
Nelson has also made the role of slavery a focus of his scholarship, including his award-winning book Architecture and Empire in Jamaica and articles on the U.S. Capitol and on Confederate memorials in Richmond and Charlottesville.
Ellis, who runs a business out of Atlanta, studied at UVA in the 1970s, and serves as president of the Jefferson Council, a new alumni group “dedicated to preserving the legacy of Thomas Jefferson,” has every right to dislike the progressive values that Nelson embodies. He may choose to ignore the horrors of racialized slavery. But when he attacks Nelson—and others at UVA, including students, who have demanded a new reconciliation with the past—he attacks the pursuit of knowledge.
The past is a painful place, to paraphrase Nelson. Only by coming to terms with it, first and foremost in our own communities by “telling an accurate history,” can we forge a more inclusive future and begin “the work of repairing harm.” As Nelson and Niya Bates wrote on PLATFORM in 2021, the “lives of oppressed and displaced populations are best resuscitated through the close examination of the physical record left behind in historic buildings and landscapes.” To cast aside that work is to cast aside those lives and the very spirit of the democracy that Americans aspire to.
Citation
PLATFORM, “Defending Architectural History,” editorial, PLATFORM, Mar. 6, 2023.
