When students give tours at UVA, they talk about the usual stuff – dorms and dining halls, academics and extra-curricular activities.
“What makes all of our organizations unique is their independence. Organizations are founded and led by students with little to no administrator control,” says a guide who narrates online tours.
And, to prove the point, the student guide service has decided it will proceed with historic tours, whether the administration likes it or not. Leader Jack Giese admits certain topics invite complaints from some visitors.
“Stories of co-education and integration at UVA as well as on particular tours where it may be relevant to discuss the history of eugenics, but I think the subject that gets the most pushback is the inclusion of enslavement and the emphasis on that,” Giese says.
But he and leader Davis Taliaferro take complaints in stride and think dialogue with guests is a good thing.
“We get pushback, but I think that a lot of that can be healthy,” Taliaferro says. “That’s just a part of the process of what it looks like to share history in the United States right now,” Giese adds.
He says students are guided, in part, by what others who offer tours of Virginia history do and say.
“How do you communicate sometimes complicated histories to people with widely varying knowledge of that history? A lot of times we use the local expertise present at places like Monticello as a way to learn about how we can do that effectively.”
Taliaferro says they’ve reached fundamental agreement with the university on admission tours, but they claim talks about history tours have lagged, and since a new crop of students arrives every year, they felt it was important to keep the tradition alive so senior guides can work with younger students in perfecting their performance.
“In order to maintain the institutional knowledge that we have on how to give a historical tour, to uphold what we view as very important function that we perform – having conversations about history – we had to make the decision that we made.”
He stresses that student guides are still happy to talk with administrators. But, for now, they’ll use social media to offer their free, historic tours of UVA grounds.
