As soon as I sat down with Eva Surovell at Grit Coffee, I realized that I had no questions prepared. Normally, for me at least, this would be a terrible start to an interview. But as we were placing our orders, the editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily revealed herself to be so personable and eager to speak that I thought this meeting could simply be a conversation between two editors, a chance to talk shop—to just chat.
“I tell people I run the biggest gossip chain on Grounds,” Surovell said proudly. And what gossip she has! I asked to meet her for coffee the day she published her article on Bert Ellis Jr.’s role in inviting a prominent eugenics advocate, William Shockley, to speak at UVA in the 1970s. Ellis, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent appointees to the university’s Board of Visitors, was already a controversial figure, but this stunning and well-researched story utilized the power of UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library to shine a light on his divisive actions from nearly 50 years ago.
I was curious to know how she did it—how she was tipped off to this story and how she got ahold of people who hadn’t spoken to The Cavalier Daily in decades. But I also wanted to know more about her job, especially as I’m still fresh in my role as editor-in-chief at C-VILLE.
“I like to say that I failed upwards at Cav Daily,” she said. “I quite literally got both of my jobs, news editor and managing editor, because someone else stepped down, not because I ran for them and won them. Editor-in-chief was the first Cav Daily election that I ever won, which is really weird.”
Maybe that’s a humblebrag—Surovell, a double major in English and French, clearly worked hard to be where she is now, and her appointments to each position show that her colleagues trusted her to do the work. She said she came to UVA with a plan: work at the student newspaper, join a sorority, and run for student council. But The Cavalier Daily was the only thing that stuck, and she’s poured her life into it.
“I just wanted to write,” she said. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. Journalism seemed like a fun way of doing it.”
Transitioning from her first role as a sports reporter up the editing ladder came naturally, she said. But the personal sacrifices she’s had to make to fit everything together has left her unsure if she’d serve as an editor-in-chief at another paper. Because of the workload, she can’t take a full slate of classes. And when the buck stops at the top, there’s no one else to rely on when she can’t do something herself.
“The transition from writing to editing wasn’t as hard as the transition from editing to managing,” Surovell said. “Managing is hard. I like to write, and I don’t get to do that much of it.”
But, sometimes, she does. The Ellis story started with a message from the Cav Daily’s anonymous tip line before the semester started. Surovell was at home in northern Virginia at the time, and figured she would look into it when she was back on Grounds and could sift through the archives. But curiosity gnawed away at her.
While she was watching a Jane Austen movie with her mother, she Googled “Shockley Bert Ellis controversy.” (“I am notoriously a terrible movie-watcher,” she said. “I cannot pay attention. I’m always on my laptop or doing something else.”) The first hit was a class taught by Claudrena N. Harold, titled Black Fire: The Struggle For Social Justice and Racial Equality at the University of Virginia, 1960-1995. There, on the course website, was a PDF of The Cavalier Daily from 1974 with the headline, “BSA Will Ask Union to Cancel Debate.”
“I clicked on it and my jaw just dropped,” said Surovell. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s real.’”
The next morning, Surovell drove back to UVA and headed into the archives to take photos, documenting the back-and-forth between a young Ellis—then the tri-chairman and spokesman for the now-defunct student-run University Union—and other organizations like the Black Student Alliance. For Surovell, who’s always been fascinated by UVA’s 1970s history, the conflict both fit with her conception of what the university was like at the time, and stood out as a significant event she had never heard of before.
Surovell made a list of every person mentioned in the coverage who she could find, and set about trying to contact them.
“It proved extremely difficult, ’cause some people have passed away, most of the women had changed their names,” she said. And on a personal note, “a lot of these people were figures that were very iconic in UVA history, in 1970s history, and I was intimidated about reaching out to them.”
Many of the sources she contacted didn’t even know that Ellis was on the Board of Visitors.
Naturally, next came writing the story. Surovell writes on the floor (“I’m a floor girl”). But what comes after that? “Well,” she said, “I had to email Bert and Youngkin.”
They never responded. But the wait to hear back from them left Surovell nervous. She had just moved onto the Lawn, and her name was on her door. Considering that Ellis had already gone to a Lawn student’s door to cut down a sign with a razor blade, she was concerned that there would be personal backlash from him.
“I knew that he was on Grounds too, ’cause I had met him,” she said. “I met him probably two days before this article came out.” By chance, Surovell and Ellis had crossed paths at Grit Coffee while he was in town for a BOV meeting. “I was sitting there quite literally working on the article about him and he was sitting like 10 feet away from me.”
One of Surovell’s quirks as a writer is that she has a three-song playlist she listens to before publishing a stressful article—when we spoke, the last time she played it was before posting the Ellis story. “I played it like four times, and then I went on an anxiety run,” she said. “And then I played it again, and then I published it.”
The Cavalier Daily and Surovell received glowing praise for the article, with professors and other professional journalists reaching out to compliment the work. In particular, staff from UVA Library’s Special Collections were pleased that their resources were used in such an extensive way.
“It’s just information that needs to be out there,” Surovell said about the “disappointing, not surprising” news on Ellis. “I’m glad that it’s out there—there’s work left to be done, for sure.”
Read the August 18, 2022, article “Ellis at center of controversy over eugenicist speaker while at U.Va., archives show” by Eva Surovell at cavalierdaily.com.