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For decades, the University of Virginia relied on the student-run group, University Guide Services (UGS), to lead admissions and historical tours on campus. That changed earlier this year when the university ended the group's special status designation. UGS leaders saw the move as part of a larger crackdown on history and truth-telling that is happening across the nation. Now, with the support of the student body, student guides are doubling down on their commitment to share their campus’ history.
UGS has led campus tours for UVA since the 1950s. Starting in the ‘90s, the group expanded the scope to include the more difficult parts of UVA’s history. The tours mostly covered student life, but also the Unite the Right rally in 2017, in which neo-Nazis with tiki torches marched through the campus, and how enslaved workers built the school. The decision to include these topics caused an uproar from the Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni group. The council’s website features blog posts critiquing UGS dating back to 2022. Posts often center alumni’s negative experience with tours, claiming that guides hate UVA and that tours are “part of a conscious strategy that weeds out conservative voices and reinforces a conformist, intellectual monoculture.”
“When I'm giving a tour and I'm critiquing something from the past, it comes from a place where I want people to understand where this university came from so that we can be better in the future,” Jack Giese, UGS co-chair, told Teen Vogue. “We are not a group walking around grounds trying to make people hate UVA. We want people to understand where we came from.”
Until recently, UGS was designated a Special Status Organization (SSO), which allowed it to host tours on behalf of the school and provided unique access to funding and office space. That special relationship between UGS and UVA began to fray in 2024, ostensibly due to issues with guide “reliability and tour quality.” Over the summer, the university suspended UGS’s special status, with promises to collaborate on a “performance improvement plan.” Guides said that while they were surprised by the suspension, they continued to work with the university to find a solution. Ultimately, the two groups reached an impasse.
Group leaders told Teen Vogue that the administration’s reliability concerns focused on admissions tours, but the suspension needlessly prevented them from giving historical tours as well. While UVA interns continued admissions tours, the administration collaborated with UGS to map out a self-guided historical tour for visitors, but offered no assurances that it would not ultimately be used as a replacement for in-person tours. On the admissions side, the improvement plan included training that UGS told Teen Vogue felt redundant, given that they already had a semester-long training in place. They also claim the administration began to critique their tour outlines, including historical content. With no end to the negotiations in sight, UGS decided to resume historical tours in January 2025 without university approval.
“We had a hunch that they were just going to terminate the SSO agreement anyway,” UGS vice chair Ella Sher told Teen Vogue. “We needed to start building up that infrastructure again so that we could give more consistent tours in the spring and also in the following years.”
That hunch proved correct. In late February, the administration officially terminated its relationship with UGS, noting the “limited results” of the negotiations. In a statement to the student newspaper The Cavalier Daily, Stephen Farmer, vice provost for enrollment, noted that only 15 guides had completed the administration’s training plan. UGS leaders say the group has about 70 members. A University of Virginia spokesperson did not respond to Teen Vogue’s multiple requests for an interview.
Sher, Giese, and fellow co-chair Davis Taliafero suspect that there are deeper reasons why the SSO agreement was severed. In an open letter from December 2024 announcing their decision to move forward with their own independent historical tours, they wrote, “We can only see this suspension as a reaction to the anti-history voices who have long been attacking our organization.”
Though they don’t mention the Jefferson Council by name in their letter, according to The College Fix, a right-wing education news site, the council claimed responsibility for UGS’s suspension. An article quoted council cofounder, Thomas Neale, admitting, “This [suspension] was 100% due…to us.” In some of its blog posts, the council highlights the administration’s connections to UGS, advocating that UVA cut ties. “Let the student guides find their own audience for their tours…if they can,” wrote James A. Bacon, a member of the council’s advisory board, in November 2023.
Another of Bacon’s posts claimed the backlash against guides was spearheaded by council cofounder and a former member of UVA’s board of visitors, Bert Ellis. As one of his last acts on the board, Ellis voted to dismantle UVA’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The resolution passed unanimously in early March and cited Donald Trump’s executive order requiring federally funded schools to eliminate DEI efforts. The executive order is just one of Trump’s efforts to politicize funding in higher education. Speaking with The Daily Progress about the vote, Ellis said, “Every aspect of DEI is to be ripped out, shredded, and terminated.”
From the beginning, Ellis’s tenure on the board was mired in controversy. UVA students protested his appointment in 2022 due to his political views. As a student in the 1970s, Ellis invited eugenicist William Shockley to a campus debate. In 2020, Ellis also caused a stir by attempting to forcibly remove a protest sign from a student’s door. On March 26, Ellis was removed from the board by Governor Glenn Youngkin, who wrote that Ellis violated the board’s code of conduct, but did not provide further details.
“What's frustrating is that we see a lot of fear right now within colleges and administrators who are not necessarily willing to speak up for students,” Taliafero told Teen Vogue. “And I think if they were, our outcome would've been a whole lot different.” (Teen Vogue reached out to Ellis for comment.)
UVA has remained adamant that the suspension of UGS had nothing to do with its tour content. In a statement about the suspension posted to UVAToday, a spokesperson wrote that UGS’s status was suspended because “it was clear to us that the guide service needed time to improve its reliability and consistency.” The post does mention that the university “asked the guide service to respond constructively to the persistent (if intermittent) complaints about what a wide variety of guests have described as excessive negativity.”
According to UGS’s data, their tours have received mostly positive reviews with only rare complaints about historical content. Taliafero says the administration’s concerns about guide reliability, however, are not unfounded. In early February 2024, an error underestimated the number of people scheduled to attend a tour. Where previous guide no-shows just resulted in larger tour groups, this time, people who wanted to take a tour were turned away. The incident became a major focal point in the guides’ discussions with the administration. Still, Giese said, a suspension seemed to be out of proportion to the problem. “Personally, if I were an administrator and I had an issue with [tour size]...my response would not have been, I'm going to suspend the organization and probably decrease dramatically the number of people who are available to give tours,” he said.
Undeterred by the SSO termination, UGS continues to give historical tours. They intend to carry on as a student group with overwhelming support from their peers. During campus elections in early March, a referendum on the ballot condemning the UGS suspension passed with 80% of the vote. (The referendum was written prior to the SSO termination.) While some students are understandably anxious, UGS chairs say that the events of the past year have motivated students to join their group. “History tells you about how people in the past stood up to things like this," Taliafero said. "So I think when we look at history, we can find a lot of inspiration to continue the work that we're doing.”
