We, the undersigned members of the UVA community, write to protest the appointment of Donald Trump’s legislative affairs director Marc Short to a position at the Miller Center** — a hire made without broad consultation with the many stakeholders affected by that decision.

The university should not serve as a waystation for high-level members of an administration that has directly harmed our community and to this day attacks the institutions vital to a free society — the very thing that the University of Virginia, as an institution of higher education, is meant to protect.

While we do not object to dialogue with members of this administration, we do object to the use of our university to clean up their tarnished reputations. No one should be serving at the highest levels of this administration, daily supporting and defending its actions one week, then representing UVA the next.

More personally, as we approach the first anniversary of the white nationalist violence against this university, this town, and our friends, neighbors, students, faculty and staff — all of whom are represented among the injured — it is unconscionable that we would add to our university a person who served in a high-level position for the administration that first empowered, then defended, those white nationalists. We are a community still in the process of healing, and someone who defended the president’s remarks after the violence here is a barrier to that process, a source of trauma in a still-traumatized community.

We ask that the appointment of Marc Short to the Miller Center** be revoked, and that a full review be held to understand how this appointment was made.

The first few hundred signatories of this petition can be found here.

As of Friday, July 20, Politico, Inside Higher Ed, Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Talking Points Memo have covered this petition and other efforts to stop Short's appointment

 **Update: Darden Business School denies Short appointment, countering press reports. The Miller Center, meanwhile, doubles down on its commitment to hiring high-level Trump official.