@CTSScoutmom @thessaly1 My family and I are actually residents of Charlottesville. Our house is about 1.5 miles from Grounds. Personally, I think you, @CTSScoutmom, were smart not to send your daughter to college here, but not for the conservative/liberal standpoint. For a different reason entirely. If I had a daughter, I’d never allow her to go to UVA.
(Cville is a liberal town, not a conservative one. The alt-right who were here last year were from out of town. License plates from all over the country. Most of the people protesting the alt-right were local residents and walked to the downtown mall).
The real scare here is that the campus of UVA (known as “Grounds”) is no stranger to violent crime. The nation saw the fake rape story (Rolling Stone incident), and a couple of real rape/murder stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Hannah_Graham, https://wtvr.com/2016/03/03/the-disturbing-timeline-of-jesse-matthews-sexual-violence-and-murder/ )
What the nation never sees is the local news coverage of the day-to-day sexual assaults and crime here. A freshman girl from Richmond was attacked during orientation: https://www.aol.com/article/2016/08/22/uva-student-sexually-assaulted-at-knifepoint-during-orientation/21456516/
And there’s this dispicable fellow: https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/courts/then-uva-student-set-to-enter-plea-in-rape-trial/article_ec305204-86e4-11e8-85d7-176c151ceb97.html
There are areas in Cville that are very gritty and right up next to Grounds. UVA is a huge campus and naive kids are walking all over it 24/7. When girls leave local bars, they’re drunk and not paying attention to the townies following them as they leave. There are major train tracks that cut right through the most popular hangout area of UVA (the Corner); I have seen groups of hobos walking those tracks on more than a few occasions. In addition, there is a “bro culture” on Grounds in fraternities and sport teams; lots of tipsy girls find out too late their new friend was buying her shots for nefarious purposes.
Anyway, like I said, I live here. And I see it with my own eyes. Cville/UVA may sound like a small, quaint southern town, but in my opinion the crime matches that of a large, urban campus/city.
Yes, yes, there’s crime everywhere, and drunk college kids everywhere. But in the last 12 months I’ve been to 8 colleges and those schools seem to take ownership of the idea that it’s their responsibility to PREVENT crime on their campuses, not just “deal with it after it happens.” There’s a noticeable, tangible culture on campuses that take security more seriously.
And they have cracked down on the greek system in a way UVA never can. They have greek houses ON campus, not OFF campus. If the houses are on campus, they can police them thoroughly. For instance, at William & Mary, there is a walk-through of each floor of each fraternity by a school official TWICE a day, once in the afternoon and at night. At UVA, all the greek houses are located OFF Grounds and they are party-central.
College is going to cost us about $340,000 for 2 kids (out of our own pocket, no financial aid for us). For that price, I want gold-plated armed guards surrounding the campus protecting all the kids!