I come from a long line of Episcopalians, which is a nice way of saying that I come from a rich heritage of alcohol abuse. Back when the University of Virginia was a great school, it had a bail bond fund. 20-year-old Southern men were expected to get drunk and disorderly, which of course is why Fort Sumpter was fired upon in in the first place. By the way, my great great grandfather held the patent for and manufactured the cannon that Edmund Ruffin lit that some unlearned Northerners say “started” the Late Unpleasantness. Actually, that money grubbing hick lawyer from Illinois was the one who started the War, but I digress.
Back to the bail bond fund and alcohol abuse. It was a sensible policy, one that I used to spring Scott Edwards from the Farmville, Virginia jail. He had just pledged St. Anthony Hall, my fraternity, the day before. His father, Dr. Edwards was very pleased that it only took 24 hours after joining the Hall for his son to be incarcerated. Just kidding. But I will say, Dr. Edwards was pretty chill about the whole thing. Why? Because he knew that bourbon and 20-year-old bad judgment and testosterone leads to predictable results. The bail bond fund was just good scholastic policy.
When my daughter applied to the University, we took the school sponsored tour around the Grounds. There was a lady from Wisconsin who asked a stupid question about career placement or some such nonsense, and another weaselly looking fellow from L A who asked the tour guide something about vegan food or sunflower seeds, I can’t remember. Then I asked the most important question of the day; “Do y’all still have the bail bond fund?” Sadly, I was told the University did not. It had just been discontinued the previous year, and that’s just about the time the University lost its greatness among the pantheon of the world’s greatest institutions of enlightenment and reason.
The lesson of course is: do away with the bail bond fund and slide into the deep and dark abyss, a place where common sense is replaced by the mercurial dictates of the ill-informed, but oh so righteous pointy-head class. In creating the bail bond fund, the University accepted that some of its blooded colts were likely going to behave in a devilish manner. However, the University also accepted another well recognized convention, Southern Honor. This concept assured that while the boys might misbehave a bit, their offenses would hardly ever rise above just being loud and drunk, with an occasionally public urination citation. College boys like to pee on things. Big deal.
About the time the bail bond fund was eliminated, no institution at the University of Virginia was more revered than its storied Honor System. Since Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, no learning experience, no alumnus, no academic department, no great laurel or praise bestowed upon the University ever outranked the Honor System. The essence of the University is its Honor System. The Honor System is the University of Virginia. Other Virginia schools, William and Mary, Hampden-Sydney, VMI and Washington and Lee also revered and protected their honor systems. At VMI, one convicted by the Honor Court would be drummed out in the middle of the night, ornamental insignias of rank were ceremoniously stripped off the offender, and he immediately walked out of the gates onto the streets of Lexington, never to come back. The dishonest student had “disgraced the Institute.”
If you are a perfidious, pettifoggering philistine from above the Mason-Dixon line, you may not appreciate the efficacy of this system. It worked marvelously. Many of the graduates of these schools were in leadership positions throughout the Commonwealth and for many years, Virginia was undoubtedly the cleanest running and most ethical state in the Union. Governments can enact ethics laws and regulations, but generally, they are meaningless. A world without honor creates a vacuum which is filled with legalisms. Honor is a convention emanating from culture. A culture evolves organically from people living together over generations and adopting practices that benefit society. The University’s honor system was created by students to represent the convention of its culture, to think of honor above all other virtues. It purposefully incorporated principles championed by the writings of the University’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. When I was a student, it was unthinkable to lie, cheat or to steal. Not for fear of the consequences of breaking a rule, but for fear of dissolving one’s character. While rules and regulations are manufactured and administered externally, character is governed internally. In my day, there was an omnipresent, always conscionable ethos that a young man wanted to be a gentleman and a man of honor above all else. This was more important than grades, obtaining the right Wall Street job or getting into a top graduate business school.
I am a member of the Jefferson Council, a new University organization that has been formed to fight the woke madness and leftist ignorance now prevalent at the University of Virginia. Its most important mission is to restore the Honor System. At a recent gathering, a university economics professor relayed the shocking news of how Virginia’s President Jim Ryan and the woke establishment have set out to destroy the “essence” of the University. Here the ignorance and provinciality of Ivy League elites are on full display. They know nothing about our history or the purpose of our traditions, other than the spoon fed garbage they willingly and rather unstudiously indulge at their institutions of Groupthink. Since the South is bad, and white men are bad, then a Southern institution such as Virginia’s honor system must not only be bad, but must also be dismantled. The woke Left hides behind clever subterfuges. Yet, the primary motive behind every one of its actions is always HATRED, and the action it takes to assuage its hatred is always the destruction of what they hate. Blacks and Asians violate the honor system at Virginia much out of proportion to their numerical representation, so therefore the subterfuge used to destroy the Honor System is….. you guessed it……it is racist. Report an incident of cheating, and the woke mob, enabled by the University administration will attack you as a racist. Of course, Jim Ryan and his henchmen will not protect you from physical violence, but if you exercise free speech and challenge a shibboleth of the nutjob Left, such as opposition to child mutilation (aka “transitioning”) you are likely to get kicked out of school.
At my Jefferson Council meeting, it was disclosed via several polls of students that 40% of the student body cheats. This at the University of Virginia! To me, it is the most glaring example of how surreptitiously woke academia operates. The administration mouths the right words and will publicly proclaim its support for the Honor System, but secretly works to dismantle the system. I learned how teachers are pressured not to disclose cheating. Deans lean on students not to report cheating, they even threaten students. During first year orientation, there used to be 3 days of instruction on the Honor System, now the administration purposefully omits any real mention of it to incoming students. A fairly recent Chairman of the Honor Council told me about a cheating scandal at the Law School, and how law school professors and administrators put pressure on him to keep the scandal under wraps. If ever there was a profession whose members need to be policed by the Honor System, it is the scumbucket profession, ooops, excuse me, I mean the legal profession. In summary, woke administrators are actively trying to destroy the Honor System by intimidating students.
And who are these administrators? Sneering, groupthink, Ivy League carpet bagging elitists. President Ryan, an insufferable and lying virtue signaler, came to Charlottesville from Harvard. His appointees are all of a similar ilk. Harvard, Yale, MIT, blah, blah. They all suck, and they all hate the traditions of the University, and they hate the honor system most of all.
The Jeffersonian designed architecture of the University’s Rotunda and Lawn is a UNESCO World Heritage site, the only college or university in the country to receive this honor. Yet, I would rather have it all burn down and the Honor System preserved than the world renown architecture and no honor system.
The University of Virginia is ( and now was) an ideal. A place of free expression, the pursuit of truth and most of all, a temple that exalts honor above all else. If Jim Ryan and his cabal of woke gangsters all hopped on bulldozers and each took turns razing Thomas Jefferson’s Palladian buildings such that the Rotunda and the Lawn were completely destroyed, certainly they would all be fired and put in jail. However, they have done much worse. What they have destroyed is much more precious than bricks and mortar.
Governor Glenn Youngkin should use his emergency powers and fire them all. They should all get the pillory and the baseball team can and should warm up their arms by throwing rotten fruit at them.
