Alumni say tour guides push ‘inflammatory’ ‘political agenda,’ turn away prospective students
The University of Virginia has paused its independent, student-run tour guide service after on-going criticism about its approach to the institution’s history.
The Jefferson Council, an alumni organization dedicated to preserving Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence, took credit for the change.
Its members have expressed concerns for years about the University Guide Service not painting the school in a positive light to prospective students and families. Alumni accused the guides of “hat[ing] UVA” and pushing an “inflammatory” “political agenda” and “woke-ism” through their tours.
“This [suspension] was 100% due … to us,” council president Tom Neale told The College Fix in a recent interview. “They [university leaders] were in denial for three years.”
The University Guide Service is an independent tour group at UVA, run by students.
At the start of the fall semester, the public institution informed the group that its admissions and historical tours were suspended, according to a statement.
The group said the suspension follows the university’s belief that its tours are no longer reliable.
“The justification for these suspensions is based on the Administration’s view that UGS is failing to fulfill its delegated functions, particularly in terms of reliability and tour quality,” the guide service stated. “Our own accountability measures – including tour feedback solicited from all admissions tour visitors – suggest that this is an incomplete view of our tours.”
The Fix reached out to several guide service representatives via email twice over the past week for comment, but none responded.
The group is working with the Office of Undergraduate Admission to retrain its student tour guides with the hope of beginning to provide admissions tours again in the spring, according to the statement.
There is no plan yet regarding the group re-starting historical tours, according to the statement.
MORE: UVA student paper demands removal of all things Thomas Jefferson
Moving forward, university-employed interns will lead all campus tours, the Cavalier Daily student newspaper reports.
Neale at the Jefferson Council told The Fix he hopes it will stay that way. His organization has been expressing concerns with the independent tour guide program for years.
“We made the board aware of this three years ago,” Neale said. “And the former chair would say, ‘Oh I don’t believe you.’ So we sent him an audio recording.”
At the time, Neale said many board leaders were appointees of former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam; since then, sitting Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has placed 13 of the 17 trustees on the board.
Now, “I’d say all but maybe 1, maybe 2 … think this is terrible,” Neale told The Fix.
One of the alumni group’s biggest concerns was the guides’ “contextualization” of university founder Thomas Jefferson, he said.
The guide service website includes a historical fact sheet as training document for its prospective tour guides. A large section of the document focuses on the region’s history of slavery.
Another part describing Jefferson’s public education beliefs states: “Though integral to sustaining the operation of the University, women and African Americans were not included in the original vision for a universal public education system.”
Neale told The Fix the university board was “letting these kids get away with it, because they didn’t want traditional and conservative kids to go to UVA. And it was working.”
He estimated that thousands of students over the years were turned away from the university because of the student tour guides’ bias.
On the Jefferson Council’s website, alumnus James Bacon wrote the guide service has “replace[d] conveying the excitement, wonder and uniqueness of UVA with a political agenda which would seem to value inflammatory opinions/radical views versus actual history & facts.”
Others blamed President Jim Ryan, who took charge of the university in 2018.
Alumnus Kerry Moynihan commented on the council website: “There is no reason to support the University, which we love, financially, while this asleep to history ‘Woke-ism’ persists. Diamond Jim Ryan needs to recognize the facts of Jefferson’s contributions and appropriately contextualize them.”
The university media relations office did not respond to emails and phone message from The Fix asking about the changes to the tour guide service.
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IMAGE: Joseph Sohm/Shuttersock
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