by Gordon C. Morse

Jim Ryan resigned as president of the University of Virginia today and there goes a man of integrity who followed his own lights and acted upon his own beliefs. But then the political winds shifted, outside forces cranked up the pressure and it finally got to be too much.

Wait, this sounds familiar.

Oh, yeah, we got the same thing in October, 2020, when retired Army Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III stepped down as superintendent of Virginia Military Institute.

Here was another man of incontrovertible integrity who followed his own lights and acted upon his own beliefs. But then the political winds shifted, outside forces cranked up the pressure and it finally got to be too much.

Peay’s resignation followed unprecedented intervention coming out of Richmond and orchestrated by then-Governor Ralph Northam and the progressive powers that had ascended in the Virginia General Assembly.

This time we have Ryan’s resignation in the wake of unprecedented intervention coming out of Washington, D.C. and orchestrated by President Donald Trump and the conservative powers amassed in the U.S. Justice Department.

It may be time to do some rethinking about how best to govern Virginia’s public colleges and universities.

That rethinking may have to be both external and internal.

The external part requires better thinking on how to shelter and protect these campuses from undue, unwarranted and unwise political intervention. What happened to Peay and VMI was contemptible and inexcusable. What happened today to Ryan and UVA was precisely the same. There is no logical, useful governing model that allows shifting political winds to determine institutional academic leadership.

But then there’s the other part -– the internal part. The schools themselves and all those who inhabit their administrative and academic spaces, cannot operate as they are sovereign island states set far removed upon a vast silver sea.

Actually, there’s an even more telling metaphor at UVA: William Wallace’s tartan-clad Scotsmen who, upon confronting their English opponent’s on the field of battle, turned their backs to them and lifted their kilts.

This has been the preferred posture at UVA, without question, toward the outside world and it just cost them a very fine man in the person of Jim Ryan. It helps to remember at times that these are public schools.

Virginia’s two U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, both Democrats, put out a statement today saying, “decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance.”

They’re right about that, but that same well-established and respected system has been under assault by their Democratic Party state legislative leadership since the engineering of Gen. Peay’s departure from VMI close to five years ago.

One of those leaders, Virginia State Senate Majority Leader Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax), also had something to say today: “Trump’s interference in the operation of Virginia’s universities and any cooperation by those sworn to protect them will not be tolerated by the Virginia Senate.”

Really? Surovell spends his waking hours in a state of confusion. His partisanship, like that guy in the White House, never abates. Surovell and Trump are part of the problem, not the solution.

Perhaps the two candidates for governor may wish to hold forth? After Jim Ryan’s departure – the second good man to be driven by political forces from a high Virginia academic post in five years – we should all sit down and think things through.

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.