UVA President James E. Ryan: "The Imperfect Pursuit of High Ideals"

On the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist attacks on Grounds, UVA President James E. Ryan urged the University to live up to its highest ideals.

[@jimdooley2093]

I've been thinking about my school all week and hoping something positive could come from this anniversary. Thank you President Ryan. I love this message and the invitation to embrace what we can work towards. It's clear UVA is in very good hands. All best from the other side of the mountains.

[@akkc2552]

Great speech. Go Wahoos!

[@bille9243]

Academics are not known for succinctness and this speech is no exception to that rule. Most of them live in a thought experiment bubble. But kudos to him for at least dedicating about a minute of the speech to the really important points, for example, the encouragement of bigotry by the current Administration. The bottom line with bigotry is simple. Ignorance of the other (not the same thing as stupidity) leads to fear which leads to bigotry. As long as our communities, schools and yes, universities are as segregated as they are, eliminating that ignorance will continue to be a challenge. For all of their expressed idealism, there's still plenty of subtle, perhaps largely subconscious, bigotry amongst the educated class (mostly white) that this guy is a member of. That also needs to be addressed. It's sad that a country that excels so profoundly in the areas of wealth accumulation, technology, and government structure (current administration's malfeasance notwithstanding) is still so historically and philosophically illiterate and unenlightened.