We Are Resisting Erasure

The marketing team behind the name change from Virginia Wesleyan to Batten University have started a full-court press. We (the alumni) stepped up our game in January with the launch of a new website here at SavingVirginiaWesleyan.org and with more resources to gather stakeholders together to stand against the proposed change.

We've spoken up, again and again since the August 2025 announcement. The Board of Trustees and President Scott Miller have refused to listen.

Part of the institution's marketing efforts have included billboards, television ads, newspaper ads, and even stickers on the Virginian-Pilot to positively affect public opinion about the name change. While we don't have those resources, we do have public sentiment on our side if they understand the issue and have listened to both sides.

Our friends behind the Facebook page "We Are Virginia Wesleyan" published a great post this morning which highlights their feelings about the university's effort to make the resistance go away.

We Are Virginia Wesleyan makes a great point.

Our fight isn't resistance to change. It's resistance to erasure.

Here's the text from their post:

“Tradition Transformed.”

That’s the slogan.

But to many alumni, it doesn’t feel transformed. It feels erased.

When the very name under which 60 years of history was built is removed, that isn’t transformation…it’s replacement.

We were asked to trust the process. We were told the Virginia Wesleyan University legacy would be preserved.

Yet what we are seeing tells a different story.

Major marketing placements (including ads in The New York Times, along with an uptick in commercials and billboards) are pushing the new identity forward at full speed. The rollout is aggressive.

But where is the equally visible plan to preserve the Wesleyan legacy?

Where is the acknowledgment that “Tradition Transformed” sounds, to those who built it, like tradition deleted?

This isn’t resistance to change. It’s resistance to erasure.

Tradition is not a tagline. It’s earned over decades - by athletes, faculty, students, and alumni who built Virginia Wesleyan into what it is.

When you ask a community to trust the process, you owe them proof that their history matters.

Right now, that proof feels absent.

#WeAreVirginiaWesleyan