LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Free speech is a fundamental U.Va. value

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1. Free speech -- at a cost. Schapiro: Wahoo-ping and hollering at UVA over Pence visit

Schapiro: Wahoo-ping and hollering at UVA over Pence visit | Govt-and-politics | http://richmond.com

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Free speech — at a cost

Schapiro: Wahoo-ping and hollering at UVA over Pence visit

BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO Richmond Times-Dispatch Apr 6, 2022

In 1957, as Virginia and the rest of the white South boiled with rage over Black mobilization for civil rights, the famed novelist William Faulkner settled in at the University of Virginia as its first writer-in-residence. Faulkner was delighted to be there, partaking in such diversions as riding to the hounds in the surrounding countryside.

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“I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs,” Faulkner told an all-white audience at the university during a talk in which he said Black Americans, emboldened by legal and legislative advances, had to learn responsibility for freedom — a paternalistic notion that seemed moderate to some Southerners, a betrayal of white supremacy by others.

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In 2022, Faulkner’s critique of Virginians — it was an effective lampoon because there was a grain of truth to it — might apply to the overwrought controversy at the university over an appearance there next Tuesday by former Vice President Mike Pence. He is scheduled to speak as a guest of the school’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative organization inspired by William F. Buckley that’s had an off-and-on presence at UVA since the 1960s.

In a fresh kerfuffle over free speech at UVA, The Cavalier Daily student newspaper — through its editorial page — is arguing that the university should be closed to Pence because he is hostile to immigrants, gay and trans people. ... Plus, a March 17 editorial said, there is the company Pence keeps: He was No. 2 to President Donald Trump, who said the white supremacists who carried out a deadly siege of Charlottesville over two days in August 2017 were “very fine people.” Trump applied that description as well to the liberal counter-protesters who battled the racist invaders.

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Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at [phone] or [e-mail]. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis 7:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. Friday on Radio IQ, 89.7 FM in Richmond and 89.1 FM in Roanoke, and in Norfolk on WHRV, 89.5 FM.