Dean Risa Goluboff Will Lead UVA Working Group on Response to Protests

Dean Risa Goluboff will chair a University of Virginia working group of deans and other community members to lead efforts in assessing the University's response to the events of last weekend.

"I believe the working group’s recommendations will help our community recover and heal," University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan said in her announcement today. "I am grateful for Dean Goluboff’s willingness to lead this effort, and to every member of the UVA community for standing together in unity and resolve in this critical time."

Goluboff sent the following message as part of the announcement:

Dear Students, Colleagues, Friends,

On Tuesday, President Sullivan asked me to chair a working group of the deans and other constituent leaders to identify the next steps in the University’s response to last weekend’s events. I not only accepted her call to service; I welcomed it. As a member of this community, and also a civil rights historian and legal scholar, I can think of no more important task at this moment.

I am appalled by the attempts of white supremacists to instill fear and provoke violence in our community. Acts of racial, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-immigrant intimidation and violence are criminal. White supremacy is a doctrine of terror, meant to insult, frighten, injure, and kill. There could be no mistaking those messages last weekend, from Friday night’s march with torches on the Lawn to Saturday’s loss of life and beyond.

I write to you today to describe how I see our mission and to tell you what we have already put into motion. President Sullivan’s charge to our group was one of recovery and response. That is exactly right. We must recover from violence, from bigotry, from vulnerability. We must heal.

We must also act. Our tasks ahead are short-term and long-term; they are about physical safety and emotional well-being; they are as practical as revising policies and as lofty as advancing human progress; and they will require us to examine what we need to do within our own community and ask what we can do beyond it.

With that broad set of goals in mind, we began with the security of the University. Here is where we stand after our first meeting:

• The General Counsel’s office is already exploring revisions to our policies regarding activities that can be constitutionally proscribed on our Grounds.

• The University is assigning significant resources, additional staff members and police, both visible and not visible, to ensure safety and security across Grounds as the semester begins.

• Given the weekend events and the concerns regarding community safety, the University is hiring an outside security firm to conduct a comprehensive review of our safety and security infrastructure and to propose recommendations for future improvement.  

• We are creating a website that will serve as a central information hub for our efforts. 

Going forward, we intend to use the energy unleashed by this moment to advance the University’s commitment to democracy, social justice, inclusion, and equity. We have at our disposal the personnel, the will, and the resources to do not only what is needed but what is right.

I attended Wednesday night’s vigil on the Lawn, and I was heartened by what I saw: thousands of us peacefully recommitting ourselves, our public space, and our University to its fundamental values. Those values are hard fought and have always required concerted action to advance. My goal, and the goal of our working group, is to be a part of that concerted action, and to help shape the University’s future.

Risa Goluboff
Dean, School of Law

About Dean Goluboff

Goluboff is the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history at UVA. She earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Goluboff has written two books recognized as significant contributions to civil rights and legal history, "The Lost Promise of Civil Rights" (2007), which received the Order of the Coif award for best book in the legal field as well as the James Willard Hurst Prize, and "Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change and the Making of the 1960s" (2016), which won the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Award and the 2017 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History. Her other honors include UVA's prestigious All-University Teaching Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship and a fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies.

Related Links

Goluboff's Message to the UVA Law Community About the Charlottesville Protests