“No cuts, no fees — education should be free!”
Chants rallied from Brooks Hall all the way to the top of Carr’s Hill, as students convened Sunday morning to deliver a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan demanding a meeting to address concerns over AccessUVA, Living Wage, policies towards undocumented students, and a lack of diversity at the University.
The rally was the first of its kind for the Virginia Student Power Network, a group of students formed about two months ago committed to campaigning for social causes on campuses across the state. Approximately 45 student organizers were present at the event, from almost 20 different colleges and universities in Virginia.
In the letter delivered to Sullivan, students emphasized the University’s responsibility as the public university for the state to set the standard for other institutions of higher education.
“We urge you to live up to your mission…and realize your responsibilities to the people of Virginia,” the letter states. ”We request that you address [our] issues in print and allow for public comment on each…we demand a private meeting between you and a collection of UVa students representing each of these concerns no more than three weeks from the date of delivery of this letter.”
Claire Wyatt, lead organizer for the rally this weekend, graduated from the University last year and is now a full-time activist and participant in the VSPN.
“Getting in the same room together this weekend… I was so thrilled,” she said. “The action was so strong. It was very powerful seeing students from schools across Virginia, and knowing that they are feeling a lot of the same pressures as we are at UVa.”
Although the Living Wage campaign, and more recently, the campaign to reverse changes to AccessUVA, have been widely publicized, the issues of undocumented students and lowered racial diversity at the University have received less public attention.
“Because there are no undocumented students here [at UVa], it hasn’t really been brought up before,” Wyatt said. “It took an undocumented student who wanted to come here but couldn’t to really bring the issue to light.”
That student is Dayana Torres, a student at George Mason University.
“I dedicated my entire high school career to coming to U.Va.,” Torres said. However, she continued, the University would not consider her application because she is undocumented in the United States.
“Even though I’m not going to my dream school I’m working so that other people in the future can go to theirs,” she said.
Eden Zekarias, a third-year Batten student, also spoke at the rally, emphasizing the University’s lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity.
“The University used to actually pay black students accepted [here] to go to Yale, go to Harvard, to go out of here into other public institutions — they actually spent their money so that they could have fewer black students here,” she said. “So what do you think that tells us about what we’re looking at today?”
The percentage of African-American students at the University has decreased to around 6.5 percent in recent years, Wyatt said.
“It seems to me that it was a priority before of the University to make sure the University was racially diverse, and it doesn’t seem to be a priority anymore,” she said. “U.Va. is known to have a record low of socioeconomic diversity as it is, and it’s decreasing event from that.”
Wyatt emphasized that the previous responses AccessUVA and Living Wage campaigns have received have been unacceptable.
“The one-sentence responses are completely inadequate, and that why we were so explicit [in our letter] about the exact responses we wanted to see, because that sets a clear expectation that we would like to see, and makes it clear that if it doesn’t happen…the students who were here today will be continuing to do more.”
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