After years of planning and a two-year construction project, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics will unveil its newly expanded home – specifically designed for teaching students, hosting public events, preserving political history and creating a space for civic life on Grounds.
Center officials will celebrate the grand opening of the new space on Friday, along with a multimedia exhibit, “Campaigns That Shaped America,” featuring inaugural buttons George Washington’s supporters wore and an original 1906 Steiff Teddy bear authorized by Teddy Roosevelt.
Ken Stroupe, the center’s associate director and chief of staff, says the addition is designed to accommodate the next decade or more of expected growth at the center. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
The display is part of UVA250, the celebration of 250 years of Virginian and American independence. The new building and the display will be the center of a public open house on Saturday.
“The exhibition’s overarching message is the presidential campaigns are not simply contests for office; they are one of the principal ways American history gets made,” said Ken Stroupe, associate director and chief of staff for the center.
The new addition connects to the center’s 4,700-square-foot historic Montesano home via a glass “hyphen,” a corridor that links two structures, and adds more than 5,000 square feet. A windowed roof, known as a “lantern,” caps the large Mike and Nancy Miller Commons space that’s suitable for lectures, classes and guest speakers.
“It’s designed to be modular so that furniture can be rolled away, and the wall opened to create more space,” Stroupe said. “There’s plenty of room. We can have about 200 people sitting, and standing, it’s about 400, so it will serve our purposes for a long time. It’s exactly what we needed. It was intentionally designed for the growth that we’re expecting over the next decade or more.”
It will also be informative. Two walls of video screens will give students views of programming and live video reporting while news tickers near the roofline provide updates. Displays of political items, such as campaign buttons, pins and posters, curated from the center’s collection, will bedeck the walls.
The Center for Politics works closely with the UVA Department of Politics, providing an experiential component to the department’s theory, including conducting mock campaigns and working in actual political campaigns.
The new addition includes displays of some of the center’s political memorabilia, including a 1906 Steiff Teddy bear authorized by Teddy Roosevelt, left, and a circa 2000 portable voting booth and ballot from Florida’s 2000 presidential election, right. The ballot style led to a U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit that helped President George W. Bush defeat Al Gore. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
UVA politics professor Larry Sabato founded the Center for Politics in 1998, citing waning civility, strident partisanship and a lack of civic knowledge.
“None of that began in the 1990s, of course, but by then it was clear the country was headed in the wrong direction,” Sabato said. “It seemed to me that a university should try to do something useful about it, not by pretending politics could be made perfect, but by helping people understand it better, take part in it more fully, and improve it where they could.”
The idea for the center was to create an educational facility that “took politics seriously as the work of self-government,” Sabato said.
