On April 11, 2008, the University inaugurated Dr. Edward L. Ayers as its ninth president in the Robins Center before nearly 4,000 alumni, trustees, faculty, staff, students, parents, and other friends of the University.
Rector George W. Wellde Jr., B’74, presented the “charge to the president,” and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust officially introduced Richmond’s new leader.
Faust lauded President Ayers as the ideal choice to lead the University at this juncture in its history. “If Ed Ayers did not exist,” she said, “The University of Richmond would have wanted to invent him.”
After receiving the University Mace from Chancellor E. Bruce Heilman and the Presidential Chain of Office from Chancellor Richard L. Morrill, President Ayers expressed his appreciation to the entire University community. Then he delivered the following inaugural address.
At such an event—where we don archaic robes and regalia, where we invite delegates from institutions across the nation and across the ocean, from one founded in 1167 to others founded in 1972, where we invoke the great leaders who have made it possible for us to be here today, and where we reunite with friends who have been associated with our University for many years—it’s hard not to think about our place in the flow of time. (Especially if you happen to be a historian charged with giving a big speech.)
Chancellors Bruce Heilman (right) and Richard Morrill (center) join Ayers on stage.
More often it is easy to forget about history, to forget about the past, swept up as we are in today and tomorrow. But our history holds the seeds of what we can be, of what we can do, of what we can dream. So let’s remind ourselves of how we got here today.
What eventually became the University of Richmond began as a small Baptist academy in the middle of Virginia in 1830, in a schoolhouse on a private farmstead called “Dunlora.” And I have here in my hands nails from Dunlora, 1830, the only few remainders of that long-ago dream. After Dunlora, the Baptists moved to a farm, closer to here, where the students worked in fields and shops between classes in languages, mathematics, science, geography, and history as well as theology.
Restless and ambitious, the founders chartered themselves in 1840 as Richmond College and moved closer to the city. The leaders of the school worked throughout the 1840s and 1850s to build up the College, raising money from Baptists across the state, creating seven academic departments, and purchasing their first laboratory equipment. By 1860, Richmond College enrolled over a hundred students and occupied a handsome building about a mile from the State Capitol.
(From top) The inaugural procession, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, Ayers with Chancellor Bruce Heilman, The University Wind Ensemble, and the Ayers family.
It was at this time that the young men of Richmond College, like many young white men across the Commonwealth and the South, proclaimed themselves eager to fight to establish a separate nation. The trustees pledged the College’s resources, laboriously gained over the preceding 30 years, to the Confederacy. A fifth of the graduates of Richmond College died fighting for the Confederacy over the next four years, and the College lost everything—its buildings occupied by Federal troops, its endowment rendered worthless, its books and apparatus scattered, its once-booming city in ashes. But in 1873, ten thousand Virginia Baptists came to a canvas tabernacle on the College’s campus. And there they pledged more than a hundred thousand dollars to revitalize Richmond College—significant sacrifice, and significant confidence, amidst the poverty and uncertainty of the postwar era. The University began anew.
About this time, the College decided it could do without a president for the next quarter century. (I’m sure that was a bad idea, though the record doesn’t seem to be quite as clear on the terrible consequences of that decision as it might have. I continue to do further research.) In fact, the place seems to have flourished as the New South era began and many of the features of a modern college emerged. It was in 1893, watching some spindly baseball players, that a sportswriter dubbed the Richmond team the “Spiders.” (I would say, using my finely honed research skills, that I discovered that the College’s earlier nickname had been “The Mules.” And I think we might just pause briefly to ponder the possibilities and implications of that road not taken. It’s not really funny—the mules.) Fortunately, in 1895, the trustees came to their senses and recreated the presidency. They appointed Professor Frederic Boatwright, only 26 years old, to the post.
Now Boatwright led a campaign to join Richmond College with a new Baptist college for women, Westhampton, and to build a brand new campus to house them both. In 1914, the flourishing institution moved to rolling hills by a beautiful lake that served as a very convenient division between the sexes. President Boatwright hired Professor May Keller as the first female dean of a college in the South. A holder of a doctorate from Heidelberg, where she wrote a dissertation on Anglo-Saxon weaponry—It’s true!—Keller would be a formidable intellect and force of nature for decades to come.
President Boatwright, talking with well-earned pride when the new campus opened, declared that henceforth “all things new will date back to the class of 1915.” The University of Richmond, tried through poverty, war, and then poverty again, was reborn in the shape of an up-to-date and progressive institution. But they brought bricks with them from the old college so students could walk on the same beloved paths as they had trod before—and those bricks still rest outside Ryland Hall. But in the new school young women as well as young men could study the modern courses emerging in American higher education: political science, economics, education, sociology, and business administration.
Civil War perspectives
Three new perspectives on the American Civil War from three prominent historians kicked off the inaugural weekend.
Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, underscored the enormous loss of life—an estimated 620,000 soldiers—as “the most widely shared of the war’s experiences.” People dealt with everything from practical questions of how to dispose of bodies to spiritual questions of how God could allow this to happen, she said.
Gary Gallagher, the John L. Nau III professor in the history of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, analyzed Hollywood’s portrayal of the conflict. Hollywood’s perspective, he said, has evolved from “lost-cause” movies, such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, to “emancipation-cause” films, such as Cold Mountain and Glory.
Ayers, a historian of the American South, acknowledged the “profound confusion” that followed the war. Freed slaves struggled to find family members who had been sold down the river, while white Southerners dealt with “almost intolerable” defeat and despair. But against this backdrop of chaos and suffering, Ayers highlighted stories of solace and hope.
“History is both warning and encouragement,” he said. We need both.
To view the entire symposium, go to inauguration.richmond.edu.
And in 1920, the two colleges and a newly strengthened law school fused into the University of Richmond. Women became members of the Board of Trustees and were admitted to the law school—as President Boatwright declared, “thus carrying forward another principle of democracy.”
Ninety years after its founding, the University of Richmond took the shape that we recognize today. The fundamental organization and the landscape have endured. Living memory stretches back that far as well, as I have learned in my travels meeting alumni throughout Virginia and across the nation the last nine months. I have met one alumnus, a great-grandnephew of our founding president, who recalls playing as a boy on the brand new campus in the 19-teens. I have met men and women who attended Richmond or Westhampton during the Great Depression and others who were among the 1,300 students and alumni who served in World War II. I have met many who remember President Modlin with fondness, many who were here when the School of Business began in 1949, and many who attended University College—the predecessor to our School of Continuing Studies—soon after it opened in 1962. There are many here today who were present in 1969 when the transformative gift of $50 million from the Robins family was announced to a jubilant audience—another moment when the University, in many respects, began anew.
We all know, too, of the remarkable work of my predecessors—Bruce Heilman, Richard Morrill, and Bill Cooper—because the evidence of their skill and dedication is all around us. I view their accomplishments with pride. They have set the bar high.
Of course, Richmond presidents are fortunate to have extraordinary partners in their work. I think of Robert Jepson, who established our pioneering School of Leadership Studies 15 years ago; of Carole and Marcus Weinstein, who most recently have made possible a new Center for International Education; and again of the Robins Family, whose most recent gifts, under the leadership of Claiborne Robins Jr. and Ann Carol Marchant, are allowing us to build a new center for Westhampton College and complete the funding for a new campus stadium. Evidence of these partnerships and the support of many others is abundant in our landscape and in the strength of our programs.
(From top) Student performances featured the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the University Jazz Ensemble, and Asian Beat. About 3,500 picnickers dined on
Millhiser Green.
Today, thanks to all whom I’ve mentioned and countless others, we occupy a special place in American higher education, combining the intimacy of a small liberal arts college with the creativity of a university. Our superb faculty win prestigious awards and research grants even as they remain dedicated to their students above all else. The staff is remarkable, both for their talent and for their commitment. We attract some of the best students from across the United States and from 70 other countries, and then send them back into the world, where they do wonderful things.
There, in 10 minutes or so, is the outline of the history of the University of Richmond that we know best. That history is marked by constant change and continual progress. That history is compelling and it is ours.
But it is not the only history we inhabit, and as we seek to shape our own time here, there is still more we should remember, and celebrate, and embody. If we go back to the frame building occupied by the struggling Baptists of 1830, we see a common purpose that stretches across 10 generations to ourselves. If we look at the edges of the story, into the shadows, we see things we cannot see in the broad light of the middle. If we listen carefully, we can hear the quieter stories that tell us something important about the enduring spirit of this place.
The first president of Richmond College, Robert Ryland, announced that this would be “a Baptist College in no narrow, bigoted sense. Pupils of every creed and of no creed have been, and will be, received on the same terms, and treated with equal justice and consideration.” Ryland and other Virginia Baptists understood the importance of such broad-mindedness all too well. For much of Virginia history, they had been viewed as a dangerous and disruptive minority, prosecuted harshly for practicing their faith.
Ryland himself, although a slaveholder, served for more than 25 years as minister to the First African Church in Richmond, with 2,000 members, most of them held in slavery. When asked why he would take on such work when others doubted the wisdom of ministering to those held in bondage, Ryland recalled that “I esteemed it a holy privilege to preach the gospel to the poor; and while the negroes were in bondage and forbidden by law to have colored ministers, and even to assemble by themselves for worship, I felt that it would be an awful crime for any white preacher to decline such an opportunity.” African-Americans in Richmond used their church to create strong, vibrant, and independent leaders of their own. And after emancipation Ryland, stepping down as president, opened a school for freedpeople in Richmond when other white people were openly hostile to any such effort.
Hundreds of staff members worked many extra hours behind the scenes before, during, and after inauguration, which coincided with reunion weekend.
Ryland was true to his word in other ways. When other schools around the nation, many more famous than ours, maintained quotas or excluded Jews altogether from attending their institutions, from its early days Richmond College welcomed Jewish students. When Frederic Boatwright became president, his friend and neighbor Rabbi Edward N. Calish led the closing prayer. Our honor system was rejuvenated in the 1930s under the leadership of local student Edwin Cohen, who then went on to a distinguished career in public service.
And meanwhile, the University welcomed people from abroad. In 1909 Ah-Fong Yeung, who had come from China at age 15, graduated from Richmond and went to Columbia for his law degree before returning to China to teach. (Seventy-five years later his grandson would come to the University of Richmond from the People’s Republic of China.) Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, dozens of students from China studied at Richmond. By the 1950s, young women from Brazil and Norway proclaimed themselves very happy at Westhampton, and in 1960 Abdullah Mina, from Lebanon, wrote powerful columns for The Collegian that predicted much of the world history that would follow. “No matter how many differences there are among the peoples of the world,” he told his fellow students, “their basic needs and aspirations are the same—freedom, well-being, and peace.”
But, closer to home, the fundamental unity and equality of people had long been denied. Although the Baptists had identified themselves early in their history as enemies of slavery, they, like virtually all white Southerners, had accommodated themselves of the institution by the time Richmond College was founded. For a hundred years after emancipation, for five generations, the city, state, and region where we live demanded racial exclusion. Black people had occupied the land on which we gather today, first as enslaved people and then as free people making their own way in a hard place. When the beautiful new buildings of Ralph Adams Cram began to go up in 1911, workers walked over from Zion Town, less than a mile to our west, where they had established their own settlement after freedom.
But African-Americans could not be students here, just as they could not be students at the historically white public universities of Virginia. Black Virginians never accepted the injustice they confronted and worked throughout the 1920s and 1930s to win simple justice. The coming of World War II finally opened a new opportunity, and here in Richmond as elsewhere African-Americans pressed white Americans to live up to the claims they made about the nation’s purpose. And some University of Richmond students supported them in the early days of struggle.
In 1943, a Collegian editorial asked about segregation on the buses of the city: “Is there any good reason why the Negro should not sit with the whites? After all, Negroes are Americans too—as American as you or I. Their sons, brothers, and husbands are fighting and dying alongside of their white brethren on the fighting fronts. These Negro men are fighting for what they believe—that this country is a democracy in practice, as well as in ideals.”
Ayers and Spidey congratulate Sarah Potter, ’08, and Eric Van Der Hyde, ’08, for winning the Eco-Spider Challenge, a student contest to build a spider out of recycled materials found on campus. They called their spider “Wired for Change” to highlight the University’s efforts to go green.
The next year, in 1944, Russell Jones, according to The Collegian “a student at Virginia Union and one of the city’s outstanding young Negro leaders,” came to Westhampton College to help recruit for Richmond’s Inter-collegiate Council. That Council, supported by eight other colleges including Richmond and Westhampton, announced that it was open to everyone who wanted to “bring about better understanding between all races.” But after his talk Jones was not allowed to eat with the white students even though they invited him to do so. The students petitioned the rector and the president to remove any prohibition, but for another 20 years the University, like others across Virginia, public and private, steadfastly resisted integration.
But things then began to change, slowly. In 1964, the first black students enrolled in evening classes at the predecessor to our School of Continuing Studies, then only two years old. In 1968, the first African-American student to live in a dormitory here on campus, Barry Greene, enrolled and was welcomed. After that, the number of black students at the University slowly increased. And slowly, too, we have attracted Americans from other under-represented groups, from American families whose origins lie in China or India or Vietnam, in Mexico and Guatemala, in Bulgaria or the Ukraine.
But we all know there is more to be done to make the University of Richmond all it can be, and should be, and must be. Our past and our traditions serve as our guides as we continue this important work in making ourselves more self-aware, inclusive, and generous.
From the beginning, in various ways, this University has been about expanding opportunity. As early as 1836, half the students were what were then called “beneficiaries,” recipients of scholarships.
For the next 172 years, the University of Richmond would open doors for students of need. Whether they came to campus as day students, as Claiborne Robins did in 1927 or Marcus Weinstein did in 1946, or whether they came from distant farmsteads to live in the dormitories and work in the dining halls, or whether they came from the other side of the world, we have opened doors—though sometimes only after a great deal of knocking. Once here, students of all backgrounds have changed our University immeasurably for the better. In 1895, a critic of co-education warned in a college publication that the effects of admitting women would be “lasting, and exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate.” He was right! But wrong to worry. Now we need to open the doors of opportunity even wider.
We have an exciting opportunity before us to do so—even if that opportunity comes wrapped in the somewhat dull packaging of something called a “strategic plan.” Our faculty, staff, students, and alumni are now shaping that plan, refining and revising it, giving it flesh and blood. The plan has five principles, and those principles have crystallized out of hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversations and from eloquent responses to the question I asked all around the country and all around the campus over the last year: What do we want the University of Richmond to be known for as we move forward?
Help plan UR’s future
What does the University of Richmond want to be known for as we move forward?
President Ayers posed that question last summer to spark discussion that has produced a rough draft of a strategic plan.
The draft is available for your review and comment at strategicplan.richmond.edu. It is based on the following five principles that emerged from answers to Ayers’ initial question:
- Creating an academic enterprise that is connected, innovative, rigorous, and personal;
- Fostering an inclusive and diverse community, strengthened by the range of knowledge, opinion, belief, political perspective, and the unique backgrounds of its members;
- Making UR as affordable as possible, offering opportunities for students who can most benefit from and contribute to the educational environment;
- Engaging the larger Richmond community to shape students, both educationally and experientially, and to address the needs of the community; and
- Forging a distinctive and coherent student experience.
“It is important that the strategic plan lay out bold, meaningful goals that are worthy of our collective effort and the generations before who have given us this opportunity,” Ayers says.
And the five principles emerge directly from our history. Accordingly, one of the areas on which we will focus intently in the next five years is diversity—on integrating students, faculty, and staff of different backgrounds, experiences, and ideas more fully into one community. In the global community for which we are preparing the young men and women who study here, the old boundaries between people are shifting. We are all interconnected and interdependent, and that needs to be part of the experience our students have here. But we are not merely reacting to external forces in promoting diversity. We are stewarding one of the best parts of our legacy—the commitment to opportunity and a tradition of welcome that has characterized this institution in many ways for generations. We have work to do to expand that tradition. And we will do it.
We will also focus on the second part of the strategic plan, on affordability, because that is one of our oldest traditions and one of our greatest needs for the future. We are one of only 1 percent of the schools in the United States that do not ask how much money you have before we admit you and then guarantee to meet 100 percent of the need that you demonstrate. Generations of young men and women who have come here on scholarships have led lives of remarkable achievement, and they have given back much to this place. It is astounding to think about the ability that would have been squandered if we had not been able to enroll them, and it is sobering to think about how different the University might be today without the support they have been able to give us. While it will be challenging to maintain and expand this tradition of affordability, we will do it.
We want to bring students of all backgrounds here, not just because we believe they have something to offer this community, but because we know we have something important to offer them. Two of our other key priorities will focus on integrating more fully what is already special about the Richmond experience.
Focusing on our core academic enterprise, we will integrate higher education in a way that is done nowhere else. We can do so because each of our schools is strong, a worthy ally of the rest. We will offer our students avenues to connect the arts and sciences with business. We will invite law professors to teach undergraduates and invite law and graduate students to take advantage of the rich offerings elsewhere in the University. We will encourage our students of traditional college age to study alongside those decades older. We will use our leadership school as a model and catalyst of engaged interdisciplinary work. Just as the founding Baptists created a liberal arts college rather than a seminary, understanding that broad learning was a necessary ingredient to live in the world, we can build from our unique configuration of schools a broader academic experience than is possible almost anywhere else. And we will do that.
Ayers spun a few of his favorite records at the inaugural celebration, “Fifty Years of Rock, Jazz, Soul, and Rhythm & Blues.”
We will also focus on offering an integrated and distinctive student experience inside and outside the classroom. Our traditions here are clear. This place has always been about human connection, about educating the entire person. Our size provides for a small and close community. The landscape we occupy and the buildings we enjoy are of a human scale, nurturing and sheltering. One student, a young Civil War veteran, noted in his diary in 1868, “How strong and dear are the ties that are formed at College.” That has not changed, and Westhampton College and Richmond College hold out unique opportunities for mentoring and fellowship, just as they have for nearly a hundred years in our enduring coordinate system. Our remarkable network of international collaborations, decades in the making, brings us students from all over the world and grows every day. Our laboratories and research opportunities are accessible to undergraduates in a way that is rare anywhere else. The Office of the Chaplaincy provides a sense of personal care and support and spiritual sustenance that has always characterized the University of Richmond. Our athletic teams embody what is best about intercollegiate sports. There are ways to weave these elements together, to shape a coherent and cohesive whole that is more than the sum of its parts, to create a place of joyful learning. And we will do that.
Finally, we will focus on preparing our students for lives as engaged citizens—and the institution as a whole will become a more fully engaged citizen in the community where we live, a community that has shaped our identity in fundamental ways.
Much of what we have, we have because Richmonders have given it—through decades of hard work as well as through generous gifts. The University likewise has given much back over the last 178 years, educating tens of thousands of Virginians and creating many more Virginians from those who have come to us from elsewhere and then choose to stay and call the Commonwealth home. In the 19th century, our students volunteered their time in the city’s Alms House, in the Old Soldiers’ Home, and the State Penitentiary. Today, they are engaged in public health and the public schools, in community development, in pro bono legal work and much else that is often visible only to those whom they help. We will sustain and build upon that tradition of making this a University for Richmond as well as of Richmond.
Generations of Richmonders have bequeathed us a beautiful place, a landscape that provides the spaces for all that we do. Our generation’s responsibility is to steward this place in ways fitting with the care shown by those who have come before us and then to fulfill our responsibility to future generations. For us, that stewardship must include thinking about the larger environmental impact of the decisions we make and by educating responsible environmental citizens. And we will do that.
Achieving our aspirations in these five areas will be hard but thrilling work. It will require all of us associated with the University to contribute our energy, our ideas, our honesty, our good will, our imagination. But there is a tradition of that here, too.
It will be an exciting adventure and I look forward to pursuing it with all of you. Thank you for this opportunity—and for your faith in our shared future. Thank you.
To view the entire inauguration, visit inauguration.richmond.edu.
Send comments about this story to krhodes@richmond.edu.
