Two historians from the University of Virginia’s public policy center are resigning in protest over the hiring Marc Short, the former legislative affairs director for President Donald Trump, Politico is reporting.
William Hitchcock and Melvyn Leffler said Monday they are quitting the Miller Center at the university and blasted Short for not distancing himself from Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
The demonstration resulted in the death of one person. Trump had insisted both sides were to blame in a clash between white supremacists and protesters, USA Today noted.
In their resignation letter to the University of Virginia, Hitchcock and Leffler said: "By not speaking out at the time, by not emphasizing the threats to human decency posed by the public display of Nazi symbols and racist diatribes in our own neighborhood, Mr. Short was complicit in the erosion of our civic discourse and showed an appalling indifference to the civility of our own city and university.”
Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling historian, while Leffler is a former dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the university, according to Politico.
Short is joining Guidepost Strategies, a Washington, D.C. consulting firm while planning to teach at the university.