When I arrived on Grounds as a first year, I was swept into a whirlwind of unfamiliar faces and new environments. While I would eventually grow close with my hallmates, classmates, and professors, I felt more lost in those first weeks than at any other point in my life. I missed my hometown friends, my parents, and especially my younger brother; I missed the comfort of knowing that I would return home after a long day to caring arms. I, however, shared one thing in common with those unfamiliar faces in my first weeks on Grounds: we were all UVA students, and I had been promised at convocation that that distinction would draw us into community through a special trust.
While I had not heard of the "Community of Trust" before becoming a student, I immediately fell in love with the radical idea that I could trust and be trusted by students I had never before met, that I had a bond with every student on the basis of studying and living together, and that being a UVA student meant something special. Although I was hesitant about its tangible benefits, I was electrified by this conception of our community and started to extend trust to my fellow students. In extending this trust and opening up myself to their lives and stories, the UVA community opened itself to me, and my full, rewarding, busy life at UVA began.
I joined Honor as an educator because I wanted to show my peers the wonderful feeling of togetherness that comes from our Community of Trust, but in these conversations, and even within Honor, I faced with skepticism about the feasibility of a truly united community. They would describe trusting every UVA student as a quaint if impossible idea, a relic of a smaller, more homogeneous university. While I have been tempted to fall into that cynicism, I return to my personal experience and think about the far-reaching benefits of a true Community of Trust. How could we not strive for that ideal? Why would we give up on community when we need it most? Couldn't our different backgrounds and perspectives make our extension of trust to each other mean even more?
At my convocation after the Honor Chair's speech, the first-year in front of me whispered to one of his friends, "Do people really believe in this Honor thing?" As a UVA student and an optimist, I hope for a University where every student would be proud to answer with a resounding "yes."
A Poem for Honor's New Era
A Poem for Honor’s New Era
after James Hay Jr.’s “The Honor Men”
“To err is human; to forgive, divine”
- Alexander Pope
Out of our village’s windows,
we squinted into a dreary murk
at a woman with a tattered scarf,
orange frays whipping in sleet.
For nearly a century and a half,
we would glance and wince
at her figure until our fingers
numbed white with her cold
and we shuttered ourselves
into the myth that her absence
filled our rooms with warmth.
At last we opened the blinds
to see if she was still waiting
and were stunned by sunrise
pouring onto our white walls,
painting them with orange
light we crafted into a key
that empowered us to open our door
to her patient faith in restoration,
still empowers us to warm
with her by the fire,
empowers us to forgive each other
and to love.
In return, we hear her melody again:
she studies, leads, lives by our side,
opens us to pursue the whole truth,
makes majesty of the colonnades.
On her last evening gracing our halls,
she doesn’t walk out the door.
She fades into the purple shadows,
the great and good dreams of her youth
woven forever into the fabric of Virginia.
When I walk down the Lawn in May,
my soul may spin in memories,
the souvenirs of departing spirits,
but my heart will swell endlessly
in reverence and thankfulness
for her faded orange stitch
in the honors we have worn
and sewn.