A&S Dean Encourages New Students in First Lecture to Embrace Their 'Superpower'

On the day before the start of fall classes, the College of Arts & Sciences greeted its 2025-26 class of first-year and new transfer students with a traditional welcome on the most traditional of University of Virginia settings: the Lawn. 

Thousands of incoming students marked their entrance to the A&S community by gathering on in front of Rotunda on the morning of Aug. 25 for the annual First Lecture, delivered by Christa Acampora, the Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. 

In her welcome address, Acampora greeted the assembled students as fellow members of UVA’s Academical Village and urged them to recognize their “superpower.” 

“This superpower is the power of gathering, and it is intrinsically connected with the experience of belonging,” Acampora said.  “Many people think that belonging is a feeling that you have when you feel like you ‘fit in’ or when you are accepted. I want you to think about belonging as more than that. It takes active participation.  

“Gathering is not only about being present but also about contributing and participating — it’s how our community becomes stronger and more vibrant. There is real power in this.”  

At a time of political divisions and global unrest, Acampora said, the importance of belonging and gathering takes on even greater significance. 

“College campuses are often at the heart of political and social discourse, and it’s essential to remember that our strength lies in our ability to come together, despite differences, to actually do things together, to learn from and with each other, to discover and create together,” she said. “That is how people belong and how you can help others belong.” 

Adding to UVA's story

During a year in which the College is celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of the first classes held at UVA, Acampora described how Thomas Jefferson’s democratic vision for a new, distinctive institution of higher learning continues to resonate on Grounds. 

“This University has evolved and expanded opportunities for gathering here. As a University community, we are much larger, more diverse and globally minded and connected, and, I think we more closely reflect Jefferson’s educational ideals for this nation’s first true liberal arts university,” Acampora said.  

She encouraged the new students to look for ways to use their superpower of gathering “in being the community that makes UVA the special place that it is,” and by sharing their personal stories into the community. 

 ”We don’t have to all tell the same story about ourselves or about this place. In fact, I think one measure of the strength of a community might be its integrity in storytelling of this sort — that is, the extent to which it can bear integrating stories with disagreement, even contradictory dimensions. Some stories about this place include glorious elements alongside others we might regard as abhorrent. But the thing is that all of that now belongs to you, and you belong to it,” Acampora said.  

“The 21^st-century version of UVA cultivates a very special sense of belonging,” she added. “In some respects, UVA is a model for other universities in terms of how it tells its own stories of inclusion and exclusion, stories of its remarkable historic founder and the enslaved people who built and contributed so much to this University.” 

At the end of her remarks, Acampora encouraged students to pick up a “special gift” as they left the Lawn. Stacked on tables behind their rows and rows of seat were Commonplace Books. These blank-paged journals, provided by the College’s Office of Undergraduate Education, are intended to encourage them to jot down their ideas and reflections on what moves or inspires them over the course of their time at UVA. 

“In time, your Commonplace Book will represent the knowledge you’ve gained, the questions you’ve asked, the people who changed you, and the person you are becoming. Fill it with bold ideas, your spectacular failures, moments of joy, and everyday ordinary experiences that you savor. In that way, it will become an extraordinary book that reflects your story and how it fits into the story of UVA,” Acampora said.