O'Neil left mark on area through UVa, center work

He led a tradition-bound Southern university on the path to modernization and worked to save free speech from political and social expediency.

Robert Marchant O’Neil helped to create the current research-driven, student-centered environment at the University of Virginia in a short five-year tenure as its president before building the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression from a concept into an organization with national influence.

O’Neil, 76, handed over the reins of the First Amendment-oriented advocacy center to assistant director Joshua Wheeler on May 1. O’Neil has since moved to Washington, where he will continue serving with two higher education-oriented organizations.

“Looking back over three decades, I would recall that my experience in Charlottesville was a thoroughly enjoyable and productive one,” O’Neil said last week from his Michigan vacation house. “Though moving from Charlottesville to Washington, D.C., was inevitably a major change, it brought us much closer to half of our family and much greater proximity to nearly half our brood of grandchildren.”

For the past two decades, O’Neil has spoken out on behalf of the First Amendment through court briefs, lawsuits, seminars and annual awards of shame issued to governments, agencies, schools and others who would stifle free speech. For five years prior, he led UVa down a path of change that saw increased emphasis on faculty research, race relations and opportunities, and bringing the university to the community.

“There were many happy milestones,” O’Neil recalled. “Building the new university hospital; expanding the commerce school; cheering on national championship teams in sports like men’s soccer and women’s swimming, among many others. Near championships in football and men’s basketball and — most important along with the numbers — an unmatched record of integrity and academic achievement.”

His colleague at the free expression center said integrity and achievement are part and parcel of O’Neil’s work.

“Bob is fair to a fault,” Wheeler said. “He always tries hard to see the other side of an issue, to understand their point of view, and I’ve never seen him treat someone with a differing point of view with disrespect. His judgment is based on being fair to the point that [the center] never was involved in an issue or a case that we weren’t sure we should be involved in.”

Wheeler said that when he first met O’Neil more than 17 years ago, he found his mentor’s commitment to free expression, and his memory, to be remarkable.

“I was amazed at his powers of recall and I created a little game for myself called Stump the Bob,” Wheeler laughed. “I would look up the most obscure First Amendment-related lawsuits and find a way to work it into conversation to see if I could stump him, but I never could. In fact, he not only knew of the cases, he added detail to it that I didn’t find.”

O’Neil came to Charlottesville in 1985 when UVa’s Board of Visitors decided to hire the only Yankee to ever lead the school. The board hired him because, members said, they wanted change.

They got it.

When the Boston-born O’Neil left the University of Wisconsin to take over as top Cavalier, he increased the university’s emphasis on research, improved opportunities for minorities, worked to ease race relations and refocused on creative and liberal arts programs.

O’Neil had the credentials to be a university president. He served as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, taught at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Cincinnati and Indiana University and headed up the many campuses and schools that comprise the University of Wisconsin system.

He was already well known as a First Amendment scholar, advocate and litigator with “a clear record as a civil libertarian and an activist on issues of race and gender.”

While the university search committee was happy when O’Neil agreed to take the post, it was a bit of a shock for others, including state legislators who expected an alumnus or at least a native of the commonwealth — several of whom were in competition — to win the post.

“If not a UVa graduate, then a Virginian,” then-Del. George Allen said at the time of the appointment. “I was surprised at that.”

The expectation was well founded. Edwin Alderman, UVa’s first president, was a North Carolina native and former president of the University of North Carolina. John Lloyd Newcomb, Colgate W. Darden and Edgar F. Shannon were all Virginians, while Frank L. Hereford was born in Louisiana but had undergraduate and graduate degrees from UVa.

John T. Casteen III, who followed O’Neil, is a native Virginian who earned three degrees from UVa. Current President Teresa A. Sullivan grew up in Arkansas and Mississippi during desegregation.

Still, O’Neil said he was the closest thing to Dixie that UVa’s search committee had at the top of the list.

“Though not generally known, I was [while living in Madison, Wis.,] the southern-most of the three finalists interviewed by the UVa search committee, the other two being from Minnesota,” O’Neil said. “[It was a] clear indication of the Board of Visitors’ commitment to change.”

O’Neil’s inaugural address made the change concrete. In it he broached reaching out to the community, including working with Piedmont Virginia Community College to increase transfers and providing more opportunities for women and minorities.

He meant it.

“We immediately established task forces on the status of women and on Afro-American affairs, the latter needing fairly urgent attention given serious structural issues even at the institution with the best record of any public campus in graduating minority students,” O’Neil recalled. “Inevitably, there were also a few disappointments in regard to our diversity goals and their achievement. In retrospect, we may have moved too quickly in some areas, and might well have cautioned more deliberation than speed, despite the apparent urgency of the needs we noted.”

O’Neil was rumored to have upset some members of the Board of Visitors, some faculty and long-time administrators. Rumor further had it that he was appointed to the position at the Thomas Jefferson Center, which has ties to UVa but is an independent organization, to make room for a regime change at the school.

“[The center] actually was being planned as early as 1982, and was ready to take shape soon after I assumed the UVa presidency,” O’Neil recalled. “Rather than creating simply a think tank, [founders] wished to establish an organization that would get its hands dirty in the real world of press freedom and free speech, taking on the toughest and often less popular cases, expecting relatively few friends among other like-minded groups.”

The center created the Jefferson Muzzle awards given to shine public light on egregious violations of free expression. It sponsored regional and national conferences on First Amendment cases that reached the Supreme Court and yielded major judgments, including several that originated in Virginia.

O’Neil said the highlight of the center’s recent years — from 2006 to 2011 — was a multimillion-dollar grant from the Ford Foundation funding 43 different programs addressing campus tensions. Called the Difficult Dialogues Initiatives, the center convened eight separate conferences with regional basis and national themes.

When the grant ran out and the program ended, O’Neil decided to leave the center to Wheeler. He also finished his last university class. Then he moved.

“Many happy associations enhanced my time in Charlottesville,” O’Neil said, noting that one of his children graduated from Charlottesville High School and others from St. Anne’s-Belfield. “It’s been a wonderful experience.”