Author: graelynbrashear

A UVA dean dragged into the national spotlight by Rolling Stone’s retracted story about rape at the University is speaking out about what she says is a failure by the magazine to own up to and remedy damage inflicted on her and the school.

Nicole Eramo, an associate dean of students and UVA’s point person for sexual assault response, today sent a scathing four-page letter to Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner calling the magazine’s retraction of “A Rape on Campus” and its public shaming by the Columbia Journalism Review “too little, too late.”

The letter was shared with C-VILLE by Eramo’s attorneys at Clare Locke, an Alexandria-based firm known for representing clients in high-profile defamation cases. Partner Libby Locke would not say whether Eramo plans to take legal action against Rolling Stone, but emphasized that the firm continues to represent her.

This isn’t the first time that Eramo has criticized what she says was a deeply inaccurate portrayal of the response by the University and by her to the claims of “Jackie,” the alleged victim at the center of the piece by freelance reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Eramo wrote to Columbia School of Journalism Dean Steve Coll during the school’s review of the Rolling Stone story, and her statement made it into the Columbia Journalism Review’s eventual 13,000-word report on the article. In it, she accused the magazine of making false statements about her words and actions, and said Erdely’s piece “trivializes the complexities of providing trauma-informed support to survivors and the real difficulties inherent in balancing respect for the wishes of survivors while also providing for the safety of our communities.”

The letter she sent today, which Locke said was not vetted by UVA, is a more detailed and more emotional response. In it, Eramo says she and her attorneys met with unnamed individuals at the magazine after the story fell apart but well before the Columbia review was released, seeking a full retraction and apology for the way she and UVA were portrayed. She got neither.

“In February 2015, your attorneys flatly told us that, even though the information Jackie told the magazine about her assault had already been publicly discredited, Rolling Stone ‘stood by’ its reporting in the article about me and about the University’s ‘inaction’ (their words) in responding to Jackie and other victims of sexual assault,” Eramo writes. “Adding insult to injury, your attorneys said that the article’s portrayal of me—which cast me as an unsympathetic and manipulative false friend to sexual assault victims who is more interested in keeping assault statistics down than providing meaningful guidance to victims or holding perpetrators of sexual assault accountable—was ‘fair.’

“The true facts are very different,” she continues. “The Charlottesville Police Department and the Columbia Journalism School have both confirmed that the University encouraged Jackie to take action—and assisted her in doing so—but she refused to proceed. Specifically, I encouraged Jackie to report the alleged assault to the authorities, and I arranged for Jackie to meet with detectives almost immediately after she provided information identifying that she had been victimized at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. (To be clear, I did much more, but federal law prohibits me from discussing it with the media.) As the Charlottesville Police Department’s press release makes clear, Jackie met twice with investigators (at my encouragement) in April and May of 2014, but she refused to provide any specific details about her assault and chose not to cooperate with any criminal investigation.

“These are all things that Rolling Stone would have figured out if its reporters, editors, and fact checkers had not made a calculated decision not to contact sources who would have contradicted Rolling Stone’s preconceived storyline. But Jackie’s story of being victimized by a brutal gang rape at the hands of a UVA fraternity was simply too enticing not to publish—and UVA, its administration, and its students were too easily painted as callous villains for Rolling Stone to be burdened by the facts.”

Eramo’s letter goes on to say she received abusive and threatening e-mails and phone calls after the story was published. People told her they hoped she was raped and killed, she says.

“Equally distressing—not only to me, but to the students and victims with whom I work—is the fact that while the false allegations in the magazine were being investigated, the University had no choice but to remove me from working with the students with whom I had spent so much time building a relationship, forcing them to ‘start over’ with someone else,” she writes.

Her letter makes no specific demands, nor does it directly threaten a lawsuit. But it does claim the magazine’s public comments about its journalistic failures and its promises to institute newsroom reforms are inadequate.

“These steps are not good enough,” Eramo’s letter concludes. “The University of Virginia—and those of us who work for the University supporting victims of sexual assault—deserve better.”

To read the full text of Eramo’s letter, click here.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s 13,000-word report dismantling Rolling Stone’s retracted account of a violent gang rape at UVA was less than 24 hours old when the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, whose unnamed members the magazine’s story accused of a heinous crime, announced via press release it would sue for defamation.

The suits may not stop with the brothers. Tom Clare, an Alexandria-based attorney specializing in high-profile media defamation suits, confirmed Monday he has been retained by UVA Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo, who has publicly decried the story’s portrayal of her as an unfeeling administrator more concerned with the school’s reputation than with individual students. Clare would not comment further.

While the fraternity has also been mum on the details of its pending suit—a spokesman has twice declined interviews—it remains the only party in a field of aggrieved locals that has raised a battle cry. So what would a Phi Kappa Psi v. Rolling Stone suit look like? C-VILLE spoke to two local attorneys who know the ins and outs of libel law (defamation takes two forms; if it’s written, it’s libel, and if it’s spoken, it’s slander), and both said the fraternity faces an uphill battle.

Individual members of the frat probably won’t sue, said Charlottesville attorney Lloyd Snook. Rolling Stone’s own failures may have protected the magazine on that front, he said.

For an individual fraternity member to bring a suit, he’d have to show the story specifically defamed him, said Snook. But the alleged rapists in Erdely’s story are anonymous. Less than anonymous, it turns out: As the CJR review highlighted, the magazine never verified the existence of “Drew,” the pseudonymous ringleader of the alleged attack on Jackie, and later reporting indicated he might never have existed. It’s possible, said Snook, that there’s an individual out there who could argue the story gave a description that matched him enough to claim he was effectively named by the reporter and editors.

“But they’ve gone so far in the direction of irresponsible journalism as to be dealing with fiction, unbeknownst to themselves,” said Snook.

And the fraternity can’t sue on behalf of its individual members, said Snook, any more than the City of Charlottesville could bring suit because a few residents felt defamed by the story—the law just doesn’t work that way.

There is the option of suing as an organization or group, but Snook thinks the legal justification for that is flimsy. It would hinge on a quote in the story that merely hints at gang rape being an initiation ritual for inclusion in the frat, and defamation by implication can be hard to prove.

A group libel suit can be very tricky to win for other reasons, said Lee Livingston, a Charlottesville attorney with the firm MichieHamlett. Livingston, who emphasized that he has no direct knowledge of the Rolling Stone case, said a victory would rely on identifying damages and attaching a price tag to those damages.

“You have to ask yourself, what ultimate harm was done to the fraternity?” said Livingston. “Are people still pledging? Did anybody drop out? A jury’s not going to be that sympathetic to the hurt feelings of an organization.”

There’s something else Phi Kappa Psi would need to consider before it sued as an entity, said both lawyers, and that’s any skeletons hanging in the fraternity’s closets.

Details about past acts are generally kept out of civil litigation precisely because the court acknowledges they have the power to sway a jury, Livingston explained.

“In a defamation case, it’s different,” he said. “If there is anything to be discovered, it’s often admissible.”

That’s because plaintiffs are trying to prove that defamatory statements made their reputation go from good to bad, said Snook, “so what their reputation is becomes a matter of proof.” A defense attorney in this case would no doubt counter by trying to show the fraternity’s reputation was bad before the Rolling Stone story, he said. Among the stories that could be dusted off: former student Liz Seccuro’s successful effort to bring charges against William Beebe, the man who admitted to raping her in the Phi Kappa Psi house in 1984 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2007.

“Do you really want to open yourself up to that?” asked Snook.

The question for Phi Kappa Psi, the lawyers agreed, is whether a libel suit against Rolling Stone is worth it.

“The civil law is set up to give you money, and the money is to make up for the harm that was caused,” Livingston said. The court can’t rewrite history, he said, and the jury—which has to arrive at a unanimous decision—can’t issue an injunction against the magazine to block future reports. “If you want to go in to make a statement, that’s not what it’s set up to do.”

And a big payout seems unlikely in this case, he said, in part because Rolling Stone ordered a public airing of its failings. Courts recognize efforts to mitigate damages in cases like this, Livingston said, so while requesting CJR’s detailed report might have upped the magazine’s chances of being found liable, it probably decreased the likelihood of being hit with a huge verdict.

The fact that the fraternity would face high hurdles in a jury trial leads Snook to believe Phi Kappa Psi came out swinging with its statement of intent to sue in the hopes of reaching a quick settlement. Still, juries aren’t always predictable.

“I think it’s just sort of saber rattling at this point,” he said. But “I could be surprised.”

This is an updated story. The original is included below.

On Sunday, just shy of five months after Rolling Stone posted its explosive and flawed report on an alleged gang rape at UVA online, The Columbia Journalism Review made public a 13,000-word analysis of the reporting and editing failures that led to the publication of the piece. The picture isn’t pretty, and reaction has been swift. Amid the flood of news stories on the review and a flurry of statements from officials doubling down on their criticism of the magazine’s sensational story came an announcement many have speculated was pending: The UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity where the Rolling Stone piece said the violent rape took place, is planning on suing the magazine.

The report “demonstrates the reckless nature in which Rolling Stone researched and failed to verify facts in its article that erroneously accused Phi Kappa Psi of crimes its members did not commit,” said fraternity chapter president Stephen Scipione in a press release Monday afternoon.

Scipione declined to answer questions about plans for a lawsuit, but a spokesman representing the frat said the men and their lawyers were “prepared to pursue all legal actions necessary” to hold Rolling Stone accountable for the defamation the organization suffered as a result of the story.

Whether the CJR review will be a boon to their court case remains to be seen. But there’s one thing everybody can agree on, from Rolling Stone’s leadership to the Columbia dean who co-authored the review to advocates pushing for sexual assault policy reform at UVA: The magazine screwed up.

Not long after “A Rape on Campus” began to fall apart late last year, thanks largely to the re-reporting by The Washington Post of key facts surrounding the alleged rape of the central character, Jackie, at a Phi Kappa Psi party in 2012, the magazine issued a statement that it had lost faith in its key source, and asked Dean Steve Coll of Columbia’s J-school to lead an analysis of what went wrong. (CJR is published by the school.)

Coll and his team revealed fundamental problems with the way the article was developed and reported by freelance journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and highlighted failures by story editor Sean Woods and managing editor Will Dana to correct those problems.

Erdely issued a statement published in The New York Times Monday calling the experience of reading the CJR report “brutal and humbling” and apologizing to the magazine’s readers, staff, UVA and affected victims of sexual assault.

“I allowed my concern for Jackie’s well-being, my fear of re-traumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility to take the place of more questioning and more facts,” Erdely wrote. “These are mistakes I will not make again.”

But the report suggests the issues at play run deeper than judgment clouded by a reluctance to challenge a traumatized source. It points out three critical reporting failures that probably would have led the magazine to let go of Jackie’s story: Erdely didn’t track down the friends Jackie says she went to after being raped to get their side of the story; she failed to offer full accounts of what she knew of Jackie’s account to Phi Kappa Psi when she sought comment; and she did not verify the existence of “Drew,” Jackie’s alleged rapist, or even insist on being told his real name. Follow-up reports have suggested the rapist Jackie described to the reporter and friends may never have existed, and have also indicated she has given widely differing accounts of her assault. The Charlottesville Police Department said in March that after months of investigation, it found no evidence to support Jackie’s claims.

The measures Rolling Stone should have taken “involve basic, even routine journalistic practice—not special investigative effort,” the CJR report reads.

What’s more, the report found the magazine hid the holes in the story by using pseudonyms for the people Erdely never tracked down. That, said the reviewers, “allowed the magazine to evade coming to terms with reporting gaps.”

In an introduction to the CJR review published on Rolling Stone’s website, Dana said those at the magazine were “committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report.”

But the report itself and stories that quickly went up online after its release Sunday paint a different picture of reaction within the magazine’s ranks. Woods’ and Erdely’s own accounts to CJR contradict each other (for instance, Woods says he pushed the reporter to work harder to find Jackie’s trio of friends, while Erdely says nobody asked her why she hadn’t called them). In an interview with The New York Times, Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner insisted on putting some of the blame for the disastrous story on Jackie’s doorstep. He also said Dana and Woods would keep their jobs and the magazine would continue working with Erdely.

And the report says Dana and the magazine’s other top staff believe their editorial process is sound.

“It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” he’s quoted as saying. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.”

Some here in Charlottesville are afraid the full impact of the magazine’s mistakes has yet to be felt.

Sara Surface, a UVA third-year, is an advocate for sexual assault policy reform who was among the students interviewed by Erdely, and more recently by the CJR reviewers. The last five months have been tough, she said, not just for her, but for everyone at UVA. Now she worries that survivors will stay silent rather than risk speaking up about rape, and the media storm over the retracted story will leave their peers too burned out on the issue to carry on conversations about the difficult task of changing policy to prevent assaults.

“I am fearful that people won’t want to share their stories or report because of the fallout of the Rolling Stone article,” Surface said. “It’s now up to the University and Charlottesville community, through both advocacy and daily interactions, to help rebuild and grow safe spaces for survivors.”

UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity has announced it plans to sue Rolling Stone over a retracted story accusing members of gang rape.

Here is the story that originally ran online on April 6, 2015:

On Sunday, just shy of five months after Rolling Stone posted its explosive and flawed report on a gang rape at UVA online, The Columbia Journalism Review made public a 13,000-word analysis on the reporting and editing failures that led to the publication of the piece. The picture isn’t pretty.

Not long after “A Rape on Campus” began to fall apart late last year,  thanks largely to the re-reporting by the Washington Post of key facts surrounding the alleged 2012 gang rape of the central character, Jackie, at Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, the magazine issued a statement that it had lost faith in its key source, and asked Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Dean Steve Coll to lead an analysis of what went wrong (CJR is published by the school).

Coll and his team’s forensic takedown of the article has revealed fundamental problems with the way it was developed and reported by freelance journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and highlighted failures by story editor Sean Woods and managing editor Will Dana to correct those problems. The CJR review also lays out recommended changes to newsroom policies at Rolling Stone and suggestions for journalists trying to conscientiously cover the serious issues surrounding campus sexual assault.

“This report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone,” wrote Dana in a brief introduction to the magazine’s own online posting of the report. “It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document­—a piece of journalism, as Coll describes it, about a failure of journalism.”

In that statement, Dana announced the publication was officially retracting Erdely’s story. The reporter herself issued a statement published in the New York Times—her first since the dismantling of the piece—calling the experience of reading the CJR report “brutal and humbling” and apologizing to the magazine’s readers, staff, UVA and affected victims of sexual assault.

“I allowed my concern for Jackie’s well-being, my fear of re-traumatizing her, and my confidence in her credibility to take the place of more questioning and more facts,” Erdely wrote. “These are mistakes I will not make again.”

But the report suggests the issues at play run deeper than judgement clouded by a reluctance to challenge a traumatized source. It points out three critical reporting failures that probably would have led the magazine to let go of Jackie’s story as the anchor for its investigation of campus rape.

The failures “involve basic, even routine journalistic practice—not special investigative effort,” the report reads. “And if these reporting pathways had been followed, Rolling Stone very likely would have avoided trouble.”

First, the report says, Erdely should have tracked down the three friends Jackie says she went to after being raped, who were presented negatively in the article, and asked them for their side of the story. As later reporting would show, those friends could have raised serious issues about Jackie’s account: She had told them a fundamentally different story than what was told to Erdely, for starters. Woods should have insisted she push harder to find the friends, despite Erdely’s concerns about alienating Jackie, says the report.

Another big problem: Erdely didn’t offer full accounts of what she knew of Jackie’s story to members of Phi Kappa Psi. Instead, she merely asked them for “comment,” possibly because she wanted to avoid allowing the fraternity to aggressively rebut Jackie’s claims before the piece came out. But the fraternity’s investigation of the claims post-publication revealed significant details in their favor, such as the fact that they didn’t host a party the night Jackie said she was raped in the Phi Psi house.

“Even if Rolling Stone did not trust Phi Kappa Psi’s motivations, if it had given the fraternity a chance to review the allegations in detail, the factual discrepancies the fraternity would likely have reported might have led Erdely and her editors to try to verify Jackie’s account more thoroughly,” says the report.

And finally, the magazine backed down from an initial effort to learn the full name of Jackie’s alleged rapist, the student called “Drew” in the story. Jackie, whom the CJR report says became increasingly hard to reach after Erdely pressured her for identifying information, said she was afraid of “Drew,” but never demanded that the reporter refrain from attempting to track him down.

“She even suggested a way to do so—by checking the fraternity’s roster,” the report says.

But then Jackie went silent completely, according to the report, and with two weeks left before the story closed, Erdely and Woods made a fateful decision: They agreed to use a fake name for the alleged attacker in the story, and wouldn’t try to locate him for their own verification purposes. Jackie once again began participating fully in the reporting and fact-checking of the story. Dana told CJR he was unaware when he read drafts of the story that Erdely and Woods had never learned who “Drew” actually was.

By giving up their search for potential sources who should have been offered a chance to defend themselves, the magazine relied far too heavily on a single source, the report says, and by using pseudonyms, they “allowed the magazine to evade coming to terms with reporting gaps.”

Also highlighted by the CJR examination were failings at the fact-checking level. The journalist who reviewed the story wasn’t named in the piece, but is quoted as saying she was “aware of the fact that UVA believed this story to be true,” which was a misunderstanding. According to the report, when the fact-checker brought her concerns about the use of second-hand quotes to Woods and Erdely, they dismissed them.

The report wraps up with specific recommendations for changes to Rolling Stone’s reporting practices: Avoid using pseudonyms, check derogatory information with multiple sources, and confront key players with details. It also offers suggestions for journalists taking on the challenge of reporting on campus sexual assault, turning to seasoned veterans who have done so successfully. Those reporters make the case for working harder to strike a balance between being sensitive to survivors and verifying facts and gives practical advice for how to corroborate accounts.

In his introduction to the CJR review, Dana said those at Rolling Stone were “committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report.”

But the report itself and stories that quickly went up online after its release Sunday paint a different picture of reaction within the magazine’s ranks. Woods’ and Erdely’s own accounts to CJR of the editing process contradict each other (for instance, Woods says he pushed the reporter to work harder to find Jackie’s trio of friends, while Erdely says nobody asked her why she hadn’t called them). In an interview with The New York Times, Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner insisted on putting some of the blame for the disastrous story on Jackie’s doorstep. He also said Dana and Woods would keep their jobs and the magazine would continue working with Erdely.

And despite Dana’s stated commitment to change, the report itself says he and the magazine’s other top staff believe their editorial process is sound.

“It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” he’s quoted as saying in the report. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.”

 

Last week, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors approved a plan to increase tuition and fees for incoming first-years by 11 percent, a hike that will largely go to pay for grants to lower-income students. The plan’s engineers say it aims to put a UVA education within reach of those Virginians who can least afford it, but the vote has sparked protest on Grounds from students and others who say the University is edging closer to a funding model that looks more and more like those embraced by private colleges.

John Griffin, the Board of Visitors member who helped develop the new “Affordable Excellence” funding model as chair of a finance subcommittee, explained the approach in an interview last week. All in-state students face a 3.6 percent increase in tuition and fees next year—an additional $470. Out-of-state students will see a 3.7 percent hike. A similar increase for all will come the following year, raises Griffin said are approximately equal to the expected higher ed inflation rate plus an additional 1 percent.

Those increases are intended to cover the normal growing costs of education. One example, said Griffin: the heightened security and expensive legal review rolled out in the wake of the controversial Rolling Stone story on campus sexual assault that detailed a now debunked account of a gang rape at a UVA fraternity house.

“The University is investing heavily in student safety,” said Griffin, and has hired attorneys to examine and interpret the federal gender discrimination laws that mandate schools’ obligations to prevent assaults. “It’s costly,” he said.

Separate from the across-the-board ratcheting-up are two big jumps for the next two classes of incoming in-state students. Virginians matriculating at UVA in the fall of 2015 will pay an extra $1,000, and those entering in 2016 will shell out another $1,000 on top of that. The “step increases,” as the Board calls them, will mean that in less than two years, in-state first-years will see a sticker price for tuition and fees that’s 22 percent higher than that paid by students who enrolled last fall.

Griffin said the money will go toward lowering loan caps for students with demonstrated financial need: The maximum debt load for the poorest students—those with family incomes up to twice the federal poverty line, who currently make up 8.6 percent of in-state undergraduates—will be set at $4,000. For those determined to have some need, the cap will be $18,000. Altogether, more than a third of UVA students will see their maximum debt load drop, including current students.

The new financing structure partially reverses a dramatic scaling back of AccessUVA, the University’s financial aid program, that took place two years ago. The program was launched with great fanfare in 2004, and made a zero-loan promise to low-income in-state students, meaning the school essentially ate the cost of their entire education. But then the economy took a dive. The number of students qualifying for big aid packages rose dramatically, and by 2013, University leaders were calling AccessUVA unsustainable. The board voted that year to require even its lowest-income students to take out $14,000 in loans.

The plan approved by the board last week strikes something of a compromise—one paid for with tuition hikes applied across the board, but ultimately largely borne by students who don’t qualify for aid. The so-called “high tuition, high aid” model has long been embraced by private universities, but Griffin balked at applying the term to what UVA is doing. Yes, out-of-state tuition is high, he said, but the in-state tuition paid by 70 percent of students is on par with peer public institutions.

“We just thought it was a great trade-off,” Griffin said of the two $1,000 step increases faced by incoming students over the next two years. “It’s not a huge increase.”

And at the same time it’s upping tuition, the University is redoubling its efforts to shore up AccessUVA, said Griffin, launching a commitment to raising $1 billion for the program’s endowment. The payout would cover much of the grant aid going forward, he said.

The plan enjoyed wide support on the board, but there was one notable no vote. Former Rector Helen Dragas criticized the plan and the process by which the board adopted it.

“We need to give the public reasonable time for input and I don’t think we’ve done that,” she said.

Among the most vocal critics of the increase are the activists of UVA Students United, whose members slammed the board for a decision they say was made without transparency.

The new plan was announced just days before it was approved, leaving students no chance to respond, said fourth-year Gregory Lewis. Student activists did their best to make their voices heard anyway, taking turns sitting in and holding up signs while the Board of Visitors discussed the tuition hike last Tuesday in its usual meeting room in UVA’s Small Special Collections Library. But when protesters returned for day two of board meetings, Lewis said they found themselves locked out of the building, which was guarded by armed University police officers.

UVA spokesman Anthony de Bruyn said UVA administrators and police decided to limit access on the second day “to avoid over-crowding,” and offered tickets to open sessions on a first-come, first-served basis. He confirmed that the University had closed the building to the public during the board’s closed sessions.

Students said they weren’t informed of the change.

“When we asked what the justification for closing the entire library was, we got no response,” said UVA Students United member Londeka Mthethwa in an e-mail.

What would they have said had they been able to weigh in?

“The model doesn’t make sense on the surface,” said Lewis. “If you want to make UVA cheaper, you lower tuition.”

A high tuition, high aid plan will lower the debt burden for some students, he said, but when that’s been tried at other schools —he points to the University of Michigan as an example—it’s resulted in fewer poor and minority students enrolling, not more.

“It works out well for the low-income students who get in, but there’s a disincentive for the University to let in more low-income students,” he said.

And he’s not convinced that the plan to boost AccessUVA with a giving campaign will work. “They have no real plan or concrete steps that they’re going to take to make this commitment,” Lewis said. “Two years ago we had huge cuts in AccessUVA. There’s nothing that would stop them from doing the same thing in a year or two.”

Experts say critics have reason to be skeptical.

Michelle Cooper is the president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a D.C.-based think tank. She said there are good reasons to be wary of public schools embracing a model that raises tuition in order to fund discounts for needy students.

“To your lowest-income families, the sticker shock phenomenon can have a very big effect,” she said, and can actually keep people from applying to college at all. “They immediately opt out and say, ‘I can’t afford to go there.’”

As public institutions like UVA see their state aid shrink, they should be focused on making cuts so they can operate within their means, she said, instead of trying to play games with grants and loan caps.

“If you keep increasing tuition, financial aid will never be able to keep up,” Cooper said. “It will always be chasing the tail of rising tuition and fees.”

UVA is walking an especially tight line, said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, because it’s trying to uphold its elite reputation and simultaneously fulfill its obligation to serve a broader public mission, all in the face of diminishing state support. Public schools that embrace a high tuition, high aid model are trying to have it both ways, he said, and that’s hard to do: If a school chases status by recruiting students with high test scores, high grades and fat checkbooks, its student body will be richer and whiter.

“The people of Virginia have to decide what they want,” he said. “Do they want this stellar institution on the hill, or do they want the UVA student body to look like the college-age population of Virginia?”

Griffin maintained that UVA is in a better position than many. It has a massive endowment—now reportedly north of $7 billion, far outpacing several Ivy League private schools—that affords some security. More importantly, he said, it’s successfully called on deep-pocketed and generous alumni in the past, and it will continue to do so.

“I don’t worry about UVA fulfilling our public duty because of donors stepping up,” Griffin said.

Can turning to private donors successfully close the widening gaps in public education? Schools are certainly trying to make that model work, said Carnevale, but he believes there’s only so far it can go.

“Push that logic to the wall—the generation that graduates funds the generation that’s coming in,” he said, and all the while, costs go up. “It’s like an arms race. There’s no end.”