And oh so many to manage and lead.

by Gordon C. Morse

The University of Virginia, it announced on Monday, has an interim president. His name is Paul G. Mahoney and he’s been around for a while – living and working within the body of the beast – and that’s promising. He has friends; he knows the culture. He might do some good while the 28-member search committee looks about for a permanent person.

Mahoney is a former dean of the UVA Law School, a product of MIT and Yale Law School, a corporate law scholar -– securities regulation, financial derivatives, contracts, stuff like that — and a former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Interesting, huh? Interesting is good. Interesting may help get people to listen.

Mahoney can’t just occupy space, breathing. Not while matters continue to throb and roll. He should wield complete leadership, even if over a limited tenure. Between the existing UVA faculty, the existing governor, the existing state legislature and all the rest of the things that exist -– the students start returning soon -– calm seas hardly beckon.

We know about the Department of Justice, of course. It seeks to enforce the Supreme Court’s 2023 Harvard ruling which bars racial discrimination as a categorical factor in the admissions process. Logic leads to an obvious conclusion: collegiate race-based administrative dictums are kaput.

The court’s current configuration contributed to its conclusion no doubt, but “a quota is a divider of society, a creator of castes,” legal scholar Alexander Bickel wrote a half century ago. “And it is all the worse for its racial base, especially in a society desperately striving for an equality that will make race irrelevant.”

We may yet be getting there. Hard to say for sure. The ”race irrelevant” lobby occupies a corner of Donald Trump’s political base and a substantial portion of it, I’d guess, cannot stand Trump personally. Contradictions may confound a stable democratic majority on this topic.

In the wonderful world of academe –- UVA, no exception -– it’s obviously been a difficult and disorienting adjustment. Denial abounds. Just the other day, UVA’s faculty got out with a resolution condemning the Board of Visitors for not doing enough to help save James Ryan, the former president.

But what exactly did the faculty itself do to simplify life for Ryan? It seems a fair question to ask at this point. They might have done plenty, but were often running about doing the opposite. The faculty at UVA is no more monolithic than any other group of well-educated, opinionated people -– so it may be unfair to pick on them as a whole.

Still, dear lord. Even if you fervently believe you’re right, you cannot advocate or administer policies at a state agency that sit well outside the public mean and then just shove the president out there to hold off the mob. The mob might just slice and dice him and, via Trump, it did. Ryan, a good and true scholar, looked beaten at the end and it was rough to see. With more support from within and less manic crusading, he might have endured.

Might have.

Not that anyone else is helping much, either. The level of un-useful behavior by all parties involved is quite remarkable.

State Sen. Creigh Deeds, for instance, just sent out a pip of a letter to UVA’s Board of Visitors that begins with the assertion that, “The General Assembly has a constitutional and statutory interest in the governance and operations of public institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth, including the University of Virginia.”

Okay, fine. But then, on that basis, he says, “to fulfill the General Assembly’s responsibility to conduct oversight, I respectfully request written responses to the following questions.”

Stop right there. There’s something missing, such as a note from the Capitol hall monitor delegating Deeds to do this.

He asks 46 questions of the school’s rector and vice-rector augmented (rough count) by 183 repetitions of “did you?” By the time the letter ends, six pages later, Deeds has warmed to the task and becomes more insisting. He imposes an August 15 deadline for a response.

Let him stew. There are 100 delegates and 40 senators and imagine if they all have 46 questions to ask. That comes to 6,440 questions, assuming full legislative participation.

“The people of Virginia,” Deeds haughtily declares, “deserve to know whether political interference, external pressure, and/or secret deliberations played a role in the resignation of the University’s President. The University of Virginia belongs to the Commonwealth, and its leadership must be accountable to the public it serves.”

The people. The public. And Creigh, tribune of them all.

It’s complete rubbish. The letter means only to stir the pot and help justify further intervention by the Democrats to control the state’s college and university governing boards.

Variations on this sort of thing have occurred previously. Occasionally, a member of the General Assembly – seized, no doubt, by an irresistible impulse – spins out a letter on legislative stationary demanding this or that.

I love this one from Deeds: “What is your understanding of the significance of having lost the confidence of the people who educate students in that university?

How about, instead, we get some clarity – detailed, notarized, copies for everyone — on conditions within the Senate Democratic Caucus? What’s going on in there? Who’s calling the shots? When’s the last time they had their medication?

And, by the way, what is the caucus’ understanding of the significance of the Virginia Senate having lost the confidence of the people who vote in this state?

But let’s, not for a second, suggest that the Virginia Senate, even with all the blather, is the core problem here.

It’s more or less most everything. As the prosecutor said in the aftermath of the Paris Commune: “À Paris tout le monde était coupable.” All in Paris were guilty.

It’s that way in Richmond right now. It’s that way across America. The fellowship of lunacy is fully subscribed.

Still, UVA must be saved from itself and that starts with the realization, by all residing and working on the Grounds, that the University of Virginia is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and that entails some occasional acknowledgement.

The Charlottesville campus crowd, its faculty in particular, appears to imagine that it may do as it likes, say what it feels, and then just yell, “academic freedom.”

Check in with Texas on that front. The Austin lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37 earlier this year – it’s been since signed into law — which substantially shifts authority to state overseers to approve or reject the hiring of top university administrators, review and veto curriculum decisions, and override institutional decisions regarding general education curriculum.

Virginia has long avoided centralized control. Direct oversight over higher education, via Richmond, has not been the Virginia Way. Thrice in the 20^th century were such schemes – complete with a chancellor-on-high and some overbearing administrative structure – rejected.

The last time the proposal came up, in the 1970s, Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Wilford Kale caught up with state Sen. Edward E. Willey -– a great power of the period -– and was informed that there would be no giant “superboard” for state higher education.

Willey wondered, however, “whether the administrations are running the institutions or whether the faculty is running the institutions?”

“If we [in the General Assembly] ask these questions, we are criticized and accused” of infringing upon academic freedom.

A good reading of the present political moment would inform Virginia college and university faculty members that the concept of “academic freedom” will no longer sweep aside all before it.

Pray they take heed. Pray they find it in their hearts and minds to support President Mahoney. Pray we all stop doing stupid.

Gordon C. Morse has been writing commentary and speeches in Virginia since 1983. This column his republished with permission from his Substack account Heart’s Desire.