WE UNIVERSITY students don't know anything about Charlottesville.
This is a fact that struck me when I was voting on my absentee ballot for a county election back home. While I could name a few prominent people in the community back home, such as the mayor, the sheriff, maybe even someone on city council, I drew blanks when I asked myself the same questions about Charlottesville. I felt especially embarrassed after I remembered that the mayor is a University professor, Maurice Cox. After asking a few friends the same questions, I confirmed that I am not the only one at the University who cannot answer these simple civics questions. Whatever happened to all politics being local, as former Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill once quipped?
The answer is that the "U.Va. bubble" of separation between the Charlottesville community and University students is alive and stronger than ever. The bubble exists not only as an idea, but also in a physical sense as well. So many students in their time at the University do not venture anywhere further than the Downtown Mall, or even the Rugby Road-14th Street corridor for that matter. The bubble affects personal interactions as well, as students deride residents as "townies" and generally avoid interaction with them.
Other students at other similarly esteemed institutions (by this I do not mean Maryland, of course) seem to have at least a working relationship and knowledge of their local communities. Take, for example, an incident that occurred at Berkeley last year; when their student newspaper The Daily Californian endorsed the incumbent in the city's mayoral race in November, the challenger, now-Mayor Tom Bates, was so worried about his prospects he destroyed 1,000 copies of the newspaper.
The actions of Bates caught national attention, and the Berkeley City Council has since made it a crime to steal free newspapers. But what is more probative in terms of comparison to our community relations is that the newspaper actually cared enough to endorse a candidate in a local election. While this newspaper does throw in the occasional article on Charlottesville City Council or Mayor Cox's actions and initiatives, local issues are glaringly absent from the editorial pages. Granted, we do not live in a hotbed of controversy like Berkeley, but surely there are things that happen in Charlottesville that warrant more attention.
Of course, not knowing the answer to basic civics questions is probably more indicative of general American political apathy. But it's troubling to think that an institution which prides itself on having some of the best and brightest students (who would presumably care about civic issues) doesn't try to see the proverbial trees in the political forest.
Part of the blame falls on the University administration, who for their part have never done a good job of facilitating good "town-gown" relations. As they trumpet with significant pride on the Community Affairs Web site, the University does a great job at generating money for Virginians. But, while starting to do better through programs such as A Day In The Life (where students show Charlottesville public school students and their families the benefits of the University community), it does a poor job of creating a sense of community between students and residents. Instead, residents are left to perceive the University as this monolith that is enveloping the town and filling it with its opulent, problem-causing students causing congestion on Route 29 in the Range Rover that Daddy bought them.
Indeed, when students and the community do interact, the relation is almost entirely a negative one that consists almost solely of student discrimination and law enforcement, with little to no positive to offset. Last year's drought crisis is a prime case of this. As one friend reminded me, the city water authority set its water use based on the consumption patterns of a four-person family, knowing full well that many University students live in apartments and houses well in excess of four people. Or the JADE drug busts of last month, where students were indicted on felony charges. With these sort of interactions, it's hard to be positive about the city.
But it's exactly because of the stereotypes and discrimination that we need to be more proactive in reaching out to the Charlottesville community, meeting its people, and understanding its issues. Residents need to see students in a positive light before the community at large will stop seeing us as affluent pests they can exploit for revenue. And, in turn, we as students might discover that those "townies" are in actuality very nice people.
(Jim Prosser's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jprosser@cavalierdaily.com.)
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