UVA’s students push back against learning about other viewpoints.
I had the privilege of encountering not just one but two generations of Virginia students. The first was among my peers during the late 1990s; the second when I darkened the towers to pursue my own academic career, which remains an ongoing project to be sure.
Of course, I was instantly identified by more than one professor as having a Jesuit background. For those unfamiliar with the accolade, a Jesuit education is considered to have a certain approach to the world.
One of these is what we call in fancy-speak as the cura personalis — which involves both an intellectual curiosity about the outside world as well as a deep and animating care for the imago Dei in the world (that’s you and me). Another fancy-speak concept is called magis — which doesn’t mean magic, but rather more and always more. Jesuits are asked to find God in all things no matter what their condition, to think of persons as a unity of body, mind, and soul, to work in community, that each person has a tremendous gift worth cultivating in formation, and finally that we should work for and towards the greater glory of God — ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Naturally, all of this is anathema to Mr. Jefferson, whose deep hatred of “priestcraft” was one of the few things he and Mr. John Adams agreed upon in depth. In fact, the Jefferson-Adams dialogue discussing who will write the history of the American Revolution, to which Jefferson responds, “nobody; except merely it’s external facts” is entirely pockmarked by Jefferson and Adams knifing the Jesuits as altogether evil and pernicious.
Stick with me on this road for a moment. I promise it is going somewhere worthwhile.
Accordingly arbitrary Power, wherever it has resided, has never failed to destroy all the records Memorials and Histories of former times which it did not like and to corrupt and interpolate Such as it was cunning enough to preserve or to tolerate. We cannot therefore Say with much confidence, what Knowledge or what Virtues may have prevailed in Some former Ages in Some quarters of the World.
Nevertheless, according to the few lights that remain to Us, We may Say that the Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its Errors and Vices has been, of all that are past, the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.
Here we have two men — two arch-rivals — looking over their shoulders and remarking on the accomplishments of the age. Not that they created a utopia by any stretch, but that for the first time in human history, mankind realized that it did not have to live under the arbitrary power of kings and emperors.
Jefferson even goes so far as to predict the failure of the Congress of Vienna and the convulsion of Europe into even bloodier methods of warfare.
One will notice that for a full year, both Jefferson and Adams have nothing better to do than slam the Jesuits while giving some of their most memorable lines that historians have lauded ever since this correspondence was given to public eyes.
Yet what in particular concerned Jefferson and Adams regarding either Jesuitism (sic), bigotry, or enthusiasm as enemies of public liberty?
Enter our hero, Bert Ellis.
For those who do not know who Bert Ellis is or why there is such a hubbub over the man, Ellis is one of the recently appointed members of the UVA Board of Visitors who has taken umbrage with some of the anti-Jeffersonian sentiment that currently pervades both the faculty and as a consequence the students at The University (TM).
Of course, for the secular sin of holding opinions which differ from the secular orthodoxy and in true Monty Python fashion, the UVA Student Council and the student-run Cavalier Daily are calling for Ellis to resign or be removed. Witches must be burned, after all, especially if they weigh less than a duck.
Let us put the extremity of Ellis’ actions in plain terms. Ellis was so outraged by “offensive signage” on the Lawn that he unapologetically traveled hours to the front door of a college student with a blade to, at the very least, damage the student’s property, intimidate, and censor their speech. Whether or not Ellis used his blade, whether or not Ellis threatened the student directly, his conduct is reprehensible. Ellis’ erratic behavior and blatant disregard for students’ wellbeing is unbecoming of University leadership and has no place in our University community.
To recap, an adult prints a vulgarity, and another adult takes umbrage with it. The former is shocked (!) to discover that other people might have an opinion on such a pronouncement. Discussion is now intimidation. Speech is violence. Non-approved ideas are erratic. Disagreement is blatant disregard (and might even be Hitler) for the wellbeing of others — or at least, certain types of disagreement.
Far be it from me to point out the hyperbole here, but one has to seriously doubt a logic that employs such a degree of argumentum ad Hitlerum (fancy speak for bullshit) in order make their point.
Insofar as a selective use of free speech, that seems rather odd. Free speech is, you know… free. That Ellis engaging in free speech to challenge the viewpoints of an individual who hates UVA so much as to suggest that it perform an anatomically impossible act? One would suppose that the consequences of such strongly-held opinions would be respectful engagement on the matter at hand, yes?
Of course, the hypocrisy of invoking the “community’s health, stability and safety” as the reason not to engage in speech seems circumspect at best. Would that preclude students from hanging signs that read “Fuck UVA”? Or is that rule only invoked when challenged?
Enthusiasm seems to be the illness of the present age. With rights come duties and responsibilities, and as we participate in the public square we should feel free to express our opinions without fear of violence or coercion. Bigotry is ignorance, pure and simple, the solution for which is education. Jesuitism has a definition, namely casuistry or equivocation. 
Yet it is interesting that the opponents of Jesuitism were the enthusiastic bigots we know today as Jansenists — all rules and no faith, or as it has been remarked, those who are “as pure as saints and as proud as devils.” Morality for Jansenists is purely objective in opposition to the subjective.
Jesuits by contrast consider moral action on a case-by-case basis, which has often drawn the charge of proportionalism (i.e. what is moral in one instance may not be moral in another). Morality for the Jesuit is sacred in opposition to the subjective.
What Jefferson and many others concern themselves with Jesuitism is that such an approach makes truth a contestable thing. Morality being reduced to science, its laws should be replicable given certain conditions and instances.
Yet moral action is not materialism in the sense that Marx and others believe it to be. Moral action is profoundly connected with ideas of the sacred — not of law. To set the law on par with the sacred is, as Paul mentions in 2 Thessalonians, to create an alter Christus — that is, the anomos (lawless man) precisely because a tyrant becomes a supreme law unto himself.
That is the error these wokes are creating for themselves. The subjectivity of free discourse, for them, must be resolved into an objective framework of winners and losers. Unable to see the cura personalis, unable to call others to magis (more), unable to find God in all things, they have to cram opinions and spirit into the rigidity of us and them, friend and enemy, the “community of trust” against the Nazis.
Of course, Jesuits (and most Christians) believe in capital-T truth. Like many abstractions, we are never going to get our arms around the entire thing. Yet like other abstractions such as love, while truth remains difficult to define, we can all describe its lack in the world.
We know it is there by its absence.
Yet in this pursuit of truth, one does have to recognize the genius of a certain Jeffersonian approach to the truth which remains unique in the course of human history. That error may be tolerated so long as reason is left free to combat it. That Almighty God hath created the mind free. That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.
How we approach truth by means of an education is the real catch, because it does mean that we will inevitably bump into opinions that are not our own, which challenge us to see the world and relationships differently, even at the risk of seeing things through another person’s eyes.
This means that conversations with students and alumni, among students and among alumni, with varying ideas and thoughts and experiences, should be encouraged with a hunger bordering on the insatiable — and free from judgment.
The current Marcusian approach where error has no rights fails because rights are always with respect to persons, not ideas. Somewhere along the last 20 years, we lost sight of that.
The good news is that at the University of Virginia, this spirit still endures — albeit quietly and in hushed tones in the face of enthusiastic and even bigoted voices seeking conformity rather than free inquiry. The performative and adolescent outrage which refuses to see the arguments and opinions of others in their best possible light is by no means monopolized by either the political left or the political right.
Each person judges well what they know and is thus a good critic of those things. For each thing in specific, someone must be educated [to be a critic]; to [be a critic in general] one must be educated about everything.
Condensed, an educated mind should be able to hold an opinion without accepting it — and consider it a joy and a privilege to do so.
It is the Scout Mindset in practice, and it isn’t a bad way to be in the world.
For myself, the approach of cura personalis remains the hallmark of everything I believe is the very best of the Jesuit tradition — sans the casuistry, that is. Whether it remains a hallmark of a Virginia education remains at risk, but worth defending and preserving even at the risk of being disparaged by the very persons we intend to lead forth.