From the Editor: Vox Alumni Before There Was Vox Alumni

A low-resolution photo captures a famous moment in recent UVA Alumni Association history. It’s June 22, 2012, and then-CEO Tom Faulders (Col class of ’71) is walking past a serpentine wall to deliver alumni reaction to the Board of Visitors, which 13 days earlier had ousted the University president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Faulders is holding the reaction in his hands, printouts of 6,000-plus alumni comments, 5,700-plus of them tabulated as not happy. He tied the two-foot stack of white office paper with orange and blue ribbons, like a box from the bakery.

The Board unanimously reinstated Sullivan four days later, alumni having served up just a sliver of the backlash. Said Faulders at the time, an important part of the Association’s mission “is to provide alumni a voice.”

Faulders’ walk to the Rotunda was a forerunner to Vox Alumni, (“Voice of Alumni”), the initiative the Association launched a few years ago to collect and share alumni perspectives. Virginia Magazine’s latest Vox Alumni special report (Page 40) focuses on young alumni, surveying undergraduates from class years 2011 through 2022.

Theirs was an extraordinary time on Grounds and in the country. The exercise afforded us a first opportunity to put the recent era in historical context. The University’s 2012 presidential crisis figures into it, but so do more than a dozen other consequential and profoundly affecting events. We’ve reported on many of them over the years but not, until now, through the eyes of those who experienced them during college.

Another first, we conducted focus groups. Compelled by survey results, we sat down with the Class of 2021, whose numbers most dramatically showed a lingering COVID-19 effect, and with Black alumni, whose scores indicated a less favorable UVA experience. UVA’s Center for Survey Research, our project consultants, oversaw the undertaking and moderated the Class of 2021 sessions. For the Black alumni discussions, we recruited Siri Russell (Arch class of ’27), the School of Data Science’s associate dean for diversity.

The focus groups allowed us to gain an understanding beyond numbers, as individuals put their UVA experiences into words or, to borrow from how Russell coaxed speakers to elaborate with concrete examples, into “more words.”

“But, like, why is it not surprising, in more words?” she liked to ask. “For the casual reader of Virginia Magazine do you want to add some more words to what you mean?”

The sessions went for hours, and we only scratched the surface. We hope words and numbers combine to deepen understanding and lend insight, the very purpose of Vox Alumni, of course, just to put a bow on it with orange and blue ribbons.

Richard Gard (Col class of ’81)
Vice President, Communications, UVA Alumni Association