Some faculty members at the University of Virginia think so. In an open letter that appeared in yesterday's Cavalier Daily, twenty-four UVa architecture professors protest recent campus building projects for being "mediocre," stylistically incoherent ("a faux Jeffersonian architecture, confused between style and substance"), and culturally insensitive: "Is there a problem in choosing an architecture to stand for the values of a university at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the architecture was inaugurated at an historical moment when racial, gender, social, and economic diversity were less welcome?" Elaborating on this whopper of a question--one that, if taken seriously on its own terms, militates against having any buildings at all at UVa, since even today plenty of people on campuses are arguing that "racial, gender, social, and economic diversity" are not adequately "welcome"--architecture professor Robin Dripps told InsideHigherEd.com that "Jefferson built this campus at very different sociopolitical time. ... You could even claim the Jeffersonian architecture sends very different message to a rural black man or woman, and I think there are issues of sensitivity." The professors did not explain what sort of architecture they thought would be properly respectful of the agonies of social inequality.

The open letter comes in the wake of campus-wide uproar about a recent series of racial incidents on campus that could result in the creation of a speech code forbidding hate speech. UVa has been contemplating stepping up its anti-hate crime policies for some time now; last night an ad hoc committee of students met to discuss what new policies might look like and how they might be implemented. At that meeting. some observed quite wisely that "accused students might argue hate speech is covered under the First Amendment," while one student "suggested creating a policy of non-toleration, where a student who has knowledge regarding a hate crime could be tried for not revealing that information to the appropriate authorities." I remain convinced that you can't attempt to adjudicate "hate" without reproducing and institutionalizing the very kinds of intolerance that you are ostensibly trying to end. If a definable crime is committed--harassment, stalking, vandalism--then it should be handled as such. But attempting to punish "crimes of conscience" is profoundly repressive, anti-democratic, and, in educational settings, anti-intellectual.

Ah, yes: who was it again who called university campuses "islands of repression in a sea of freedom"?

Oh, god. When did these people become so stupid? So utterly and totally divorced from reality? Is is something in the Academy, do you think? Is it that their fields, much like modern art itself, have become so self-referrential that they have lost the ability to see beyond their own borders, much less conduct a dialogue?

And besides, how does this professor have any idea of how blacks in the time of Jefferson viewed the buildings he designed? What a joke.

Shades of Eastern Europe. Do they want Soviet-style architecture?

It's getting bad. I don't think I've ever seen as many direct parallels between Soviet communism and the university as I've seen in the last year or so.

Now, I don't know architecture, but I know what I do and do not like.

And one thing I LOATHE are those college campuses where every time a new building is built, it conforms to the fashion-of-the-moment, rather than trying to fit in with the existing architecture. It's just hideous.

I did my graduate work at a school that had some of the standard-model brick buildings, a few buildings that were in the Olde New Englande Woolen Mill style, a 1950s "moderne" building, a castle, a 1970s windowless monstrosity (a cube on stilts; I think it was an architect's response to the administration's fear about "where do we hole up if the students revolt?"), a 1990s glass-teal-and-burgdundy CorporateCube(tm).

And on, and on. Even the dormitories ranged from cosy-looking brick buildings of five stories or less to giant scary towers (I had a friend who lived on like the 23rd floor of one. She said that there were frequent, false, fire-alarms that required running down that many flights of stairs, and usually, walking back up them afterwards because the elevators would get overcrowded).

If we let people push for some kind of "P.C." building design, we'll just get more of the same - campuses that are ugly, styleless mishmashes where you feel like you're leaping from one alternate universe to another ("My 9 am class is in the castle but then at 11 I have to go to the Fake Mall for college algebra...")

Yes. I see it all now. Jefferson's Palladian architecture is out because the buildings were constructed in a time when various diversities were "less welcome" -- less than what or when, I don't know, but never mind. Gothic architecture would be out because it embodies spiritual colonialism, Christian triumphalism. Bauhaus architecture would likewise be verboten because it enshrines the tyranny of a Weberian bureaucratic rationalism, and developed in a faux-Marxist intellectual environment that ignored the oppression of women and minorities. (Thus Mies Van der Rohe throws up those brilliant modernist masterpieces in the reflecting glass of which we can see only the inequities of modern urban existence.) Worst of all, postmodern architecture is unacceptable because it arose in a culture in which George W Bush could become President of the United States -- twice!

Our way forward is clear: yurts. The only buildings permissible on university campuses are yurts.