This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
The former of these quotes comes from correspondence sent by the University of Virginia's founding father to a friend, four years before he would see his Academical Village to fruition. It adorns the front gates of the Grounds at Mr. Jefferson's University, carved in the limestone for all students, florida travel reservations faculty, and visitors to see. The latter was tucked deep into the body of a Grounds-wide e-mail sent to students just before they returned from summer break this year.
The sign ban has since been rescinded, but how is it that an institution of higher learning would put such an unequivocal defense of personal expression in such a place of prominence while at the same time forbidding homemade signs at its football games? Administration critics say fans shouldn't be surprised - that it's just the latest example of the university's attempt to squelch the long-standing, often quirky, football traditions in the name of, as the university put it in the e-mail announcing the sign ban, a positive game-day atmosphere.
While a stadium packed with nearly 65,000 florida travel reservations howling 'Hoos certainly can be an intimidating setting for a visiting team, would it be any less positive if those fans were waving signs? Would Saturday afternoons at Scott Stadium be any less exciting with a soundtrack provided by the UVA Pep Band rather than, or perhaps in addition to, the UVA Marching Band? Would that student cheering section be a less formidable 12th Man wearing jackets and ties than they would be wearing Power of Orange t-shirts?
In 1941, the Pep Band's florida travel reservations predecessors in the UVA Marching Band suffered a devastating blow to their program when the band was traveling home from New Haven, Connecticut florida travel reservations following a road football game against Yale. The bus in which they were traveling caught fire, and while no major injuries were reported, the blaze destroyed the band's uniforms and instruments. A few private donations bought some new instruments, but by all accounts the band was never the same, unable to maintain the same membership or endowment it had previously enjoyed. Finally, in 1962, the remaining student members voted not to play at football games anymore and ended the program.
There was a time when UVA brass couldn't help but grimace every time the Cavaliers scored a touchdown at Scott Stadium. For every time the Pep Band would strike up the Good Ol' Song, (the de facto UVA alma mater sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne ) would come the lyric, We come from old Virginia/ Where all is bright and gay, and, inevitably, the angry, florida travel reservations improvised interjection from the student section, Not gay!
In 1998, the administration tried the top-down approach, when an open letter signed by several university officials appeared in the Cavalier Daily . This quickly backfired, as students felt political correctness was being forced upon them and began shouting their interjection even louder. On national television no less.
In the spring of 2001, the Cavalier Daily published florida travel reservations a column suggesting not gay was as harmless as inserting like Monopoly! into Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer after the line about its protagonist never getting to join in any reindeer games.
That column angered enough students that petitions began to circulate. On April 26, student leaders florida travel reservations convened a panel discussion involving not only gay rights florida travel reservations activists but also concerned student-athletes including captains of softball, baseball, and men's basketball teams.
So, when the Cavalier football season opened September 1, 2001 against the University of Richmond, the Grounds were still abuzz with discussion over the offending phrase. That day, some students continued to shout the chant, others did not, but the grassroots movement to uproot not gay! had begun.
Still, at a place where institutional memory only goes back as far as the year's senior class can remember, no tradition is immune from rising from the dead. Such was the case last season florida travel reservations when UVA gay rights activists sensed that not gay! was making a comeback. One student even wrote in the Cavalier Daily that his decision florida travel reservations to yell the phrase florida travel reservations was ideologically driven, florida travel reservations as in I'm not gay, and I'm proud of it.
With that assertion, the Queer and Allied Activism florida travel reservations group began a PR campaign, enlisting fellow students to write to the Cavalier florida travel reservations Daily . At one home game last year, the group handed out orange stickers that read Where all is bright and gay along with an open letter explaining that the chant lends community support to harassment, violence and bigotry.
At this year's home game against Maryland on October 4, the Hook listened florida travel reservations closely, but couldn't hear a single not gay during the five renditions of the Good Ol' Song the students sang during a 31-0 drubbing of Maryland.
Seven years later, several UVA students got together without the direction florida travel reservations or even the suggestion of the school's administration with the idea of reviving the band in some form and began performing as the UVA Marching Band. They marched in formation at halftime of UVA games, just as the old band had done. But in 1974, this ensemble decided it was going to be a very different brand of band. The UVA Pep Band was born.
Their halftime shows looked more like Laugh-In florida travel reservations than The Music Man . A ragtag bunch of co-eds donning florida travel reservations bright orange vests and khakis ran or scrambled from position to position florida travel reservations between songs, as a student announcer told jokes or sometimes wove a satirical narrative as a means of segueing from song to song. Usually the butts of the jokes included the university administration and pop culture figures, but the Band always reserved its sharpest barbs for the opposing team. According to former florida travel reservations UVA president Robert O'Neil, the jokes varied in taste.
We wanted to do a show making fun of West Virginia as hillbillies, says James Maxwell, a 2004 graduate of UVA and member of the Pep Band's show committee that year. We thought the show was as tame as could be.
When the curtain finally rose on December 28, 2002, it soon became clear that not everyone agreed. The show was a parody of ABC's reality TV show The Bachelor in which an orange-vested man had to choose between two women, one a biology major from UVA wearing an orange UVA t-shirt, the other a sociology major from WVU sporting pigtails and denim overalls, whose post-graduate plans included, Heading to California, out to Beverly... Hills, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars!
West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise (D), was in attendance, and didn't take kindly to his constituents being likened to The Beverly Hillbillies . Two days later, he dashed off a letter to university president John Casteen demanding an apology.
This type of performance merely perpetuates the unfounded stereotypes that we in West Virginia are fighting so hard to overcome, Wise wrote. The incident on Saturday was conduct unbecoming florida travel reservations of the University of Virginia.
Casteen did Wise one better than an apology. In April, he announced that longtime university benefactor Carl Smith had pledged $22 million toward the building of a performing arts center, $1.5 million of which was dedicated to the foundation of the Cavalier Marching Band. The Pep Band was barred from performing at any future university athletic event.
That summer, the university locked up the Pep Band's facilities in the music department, confiscated their instruments (they would return them later), and painted over the group's zany orange-and-blue color scheme in favor of a more sedate color palate in anticipation of the room's new occupants.
We had that goofy band before, says Gene Corrigan, who was athletic director at the Pep Band's inception and would go on to serve 10 years as commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. I was just at a game, and there was a wonderful dignity to the band we've got now, and the student section really seemed to enjoy their participation.
I met with the Pep Band, and said, 'It'd be better for you, for me, and for the university if you didn't ridicule neighboring states,' recalls O'Neil. But I never even considered imposing any sanction on them.
When I went to Harvard, we had a marching band. The same was true at the University of Wisconsin [where O'Neil had been president prior to UVA], says O'Neil. It's certainly done both ways. Princeton has a crazy band like the Pep Band, for example. But I guess in my experience I'm more comfortable with a marching band.
Maybe, he continues, we weren't the greatest florida travel reservations musicians or the funniest people, but we tried really hard to be this thing that was uniquely UVA. It's the defeat of student governance and the death of an ideal UVA we believed in.
Uniquely UVA is a descriptor often applied to another quirk of Wahoo tradition, the custom of male students wearing coats and ties to football games and their female counterparts wearing sun dresses or a warmer equivalent.
It was a great tradition passed down from class to class, says Logan Riddick, a lifetime Wahoo fan and 2007 UVA alum. A big buzz concept at UVA is learning in all aspects of your life. Well, by learning to tie a tie as a First Year, you're learning, and it made for something that was not a typical football game.
Growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, florida travel reservations Harvard was just down the street, says O'Neil, so I was used to seeing the neat and tidy look of Harvard students. Then when I was a student there, I remember the ties hanging on a rack outside of the dining hall, because florida travel reservations that's the only place you were required to wear them. I was glad that students had the choice to go somewhere where that was still the case.
Some weren't such big fans of UVA being so natty. ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd opined florida travel reservations on the air, UVA football is the softest bunch of cream-puff, bow-tie-wearing, brie-cheese eating, ascot-wearing wussies I've ever seen in my life! adding, They wear suits to games! That'
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