This past Saturday, the History Club at the University of Virginia hosted its semesterly semi-formal at 1515. The History Club, founded by third-year student Robert Martin during the fall of 2023, is one of the most recent additions to UVA’s expansive catalog of CIOs. Even so, it has already made a name for itself, having hosted the likes of Melvyn Leffler, professor of history at the University; Jennifer Sessions, director of the university’s undergraduate history program; and Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics. For its semi-formal, the club hosted Ed Ayers, who taught at UVA from 1980 to 2007, and served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2001-2007 and president of the University of Richmond from 2007-2015.
Ayers began his talk by describing his career. A self-described “hillbilly” from western North Carolina, Ayers completed his undergraduate education at the University of Tennessee. By his own admission, though he graduated early, summa cum laude, he was not a particularly diligent student, and was surprised when he gained admission to a graduate program at Yale in 1974. While studying in New Haven, he found himself as one of the few southerners—much less southerners from a less affluent background—at the school. Having never previously considered his identity as a southerner, he soon began what became a lifelong study of the history and identity of the American South.
After a few years at Yale, Ayers began to search for teaching jobs. Not yet finished with his thesis and facing a tough job market amidst the “stagflation” of the 1970s, Ayers soon found that there was only one school in the country that had a job opening: the University of Virginia. After donning the first suit coat he had ever bought in his life, being told by his wife “not to pick his nose” during the interview, and an excruciatingly long delay, Ayers participated in the first major interview of his career—unaware that his main competitor was a former professor at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. Despite this, he managed to get the job, beginning a decades-long career in academia.
At the University, Ayers became known for his unique teaching style, which involved assignments such as spending an entire semester reading magazines from the year 1947 and looking at publications of a single local newspaper from Virginia over the course of the Civil War. In 2001, he was chosen to be Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He faced numerous difficulties when he assumed the position; he had no prior administrative experience, but the University was facing financial struggles and was forced to stop hiring new faculty for an extended period of time. Mere weeks into his first semester as Dean, Ayers had to respond to the devastation felt on Grounds in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Nevertheless, Ayers found a way to persist. He realized that running the College was much like studying history, as both involved looking at the motivations behind numerous different interest groups and understanding the broader context behind complicated issues. Among his accomplishments as Dean were the renovation of New Cabell Hall, the construction of Nau/Gibson Halls, and the establishment of an official office for the College along the Lawn. By the time he left the University in 2007 after decades of work, he had taught thousands of students.
Much of Ayers’ work deals with the history of the American South with a focus on the Civil War period. Throughout his career, Ayers has had to address numerous historical misconceptions about these topics, sometimes even to his own colleagues. When he entered academia, for instance, it was a matter of significant controversy over whether or not slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Ayers, who has written a book on the topic, noted that expressing what he felt was the best answer to this question could be controversial: on one hand, many southerners disliked his clear assertion that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, while many Northerners disliked his argument that the North did not go into the Civil War with the intent of ending slavery.
Ayers has also dealt with topics such as Confederate monuments in Virginia. When he served as President of the University of Richmond, for instance, he noted that there was significant controversy over the presence of such monuments in the city, which served as the capital of the Confederacy for most of its existence. In his view, many people in the South have a view of such monuments that ignores the real history behind them. For instance, he offered the following anecdote: near the statue of Stonewall Jackson in Richmond, a man stated to him that while Jackson fought for the Confederacy, he was a “great man” regardless. Ayers encouraged him to consider not just what Jackson stood for but what would have happened had his side actually won: the Confederacy would have been the only country in the world dedicated to the continued perpetuation of slavery, would have expanded into the Caribbean to acquire more slaves and gain access to more markets for the enslaved, and prevented millions of people from achieving true freedom for generations. In his view, this sort of ignorance is what led to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, which according to Ayers made it abundantly clear that the Confederate flag was a symbol of hatred, not of southern heritage.
Ayers emphasized, however, that it took many years for historians to reach many of the conclusions he has made about the Civil War. History is an ever-changing process, and sometimes historians must rethink their past views if they want to get closer to the truth. Many people, however, fail to understand this component of history. When Ayers told his mother that he was thinking of entering a graduate program in history, for instance, she told him, “That’s great, Ed, but don’t we already know what’s happened since it’s in the past?” Ayers has dedicated his career to teaching future historians that history is more than just rote memorization of past events. The History Club seeks to follow in his steps.
As a teacher I have attended several NEH institutes where I was privileged to listen to and meet Ed Ayer’s. Excellent historian with common sense and logic. University students are so privileged to hear this man.