by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The sounds you hear coming from Charlottesville are the sounds of hopes being dashed. Critics of the president of the university, Jim Ryan, and what they claim are its bloated DEI bureaucracy, its high tuition, and its “intellectual monoculture” met reality. At its just-concluded meeting, “the Board buttressed the status quo.”

Jim Bacon’s complaints about the current Board’s failure to stir things up boil down to this: It’s all Ralph Northam’s fault. This is despite the fact that 14 of the 17 board members are appointees of Glenn Youngkin.

The complaints can be sorted into two categories.

1. The deck is stacked. As Jim points out, “Governance at UVA, as at all of Virginia’s public universities, is designed to maintain stability and continuity over change.” This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is not stacked to the extent that no change is possible.

State law provides that the Rector and Vice-Rector of the Board of Visitors be elected for two-year terms. Both the current Rector, Robert Hardie, and the Vice-Rector, Carlos Brown, both Northam appointees, were elected to their posts in 2023. Therefore, they continued in those posts this fiscal year, despite there being a majority of Youngkin appointees on the Board.   

Being chairman, or in this case, Rector, of an organization carries with it inherent advantages. For example, the Board’s Manual gives the Rector power to set the agenda for each meeting. That means the Rector gets to choose what gets talked about at the meeting. But that agenda is not set in stone. The Manual allows “consideration of matters not appearing on the Regular Docket [with] the consent of two-thirds of the Visitors present.” Therefore, those 14 Youngkin appointees could have added any item to the agenda of its meeting, with a couple of votes to spare.

The Executive Committee consists of the Rector, Vice-Rector and five additional members. Jim is correct that it wields considerable power. Hardie, Brown, and Ryan shrewdly placed the vote for the members of the Executive Committee on the “consent agenda.” The consent agenda normally includes routine items which are assumed to be non-controversial and which everybody would be agreeable to. The idea is to vote on those items in a block, rather than take up time discussing them and voting on them. 

In most organizations, and I assume this is true of the UVa Board of Visitors, a single member can object to an item being on the consent agenda, thereupon causing it to be moved to the regular agenda and a vote. Furthermore, the Board’s Manual provides, “Nominations for these [other five] positions on the Executive Committee may be made by any Visitor, and if there are more than five nominations, a vote shall be taken, and the results shall be announced jointly by the Rector and the Secretary.” Four of the nominees for the eligible positions on the Executive Committee were Youngkin appointees. None of the remaining 10 Youngkin appointees chose to make any nominations.

Finally, any dissidents on the Board have a major weapon if they want to use it. State law authorizes any three members of the Board to call a special meeting. Therefore, if DEI is really the cancer on the University that some purport it to be, any three of the four members identified by Jim as the ones who tend to question the status quo can call a special meeting devoted to discussing the role of DEI at UVa. or any other topic, for that matter.

2. Youngkin made lousy appointments. To be sure, Jim does not say this directly. In fact, he seems to want to blame Ralph Northam rather than directly criticize Youngkin, but the message seems to be implicit. For example, there is his description of the four Youngkin appointees placed on the Executive Committee:  two megadonors to UVa. who are “deeply enmeshed with the Ryan administration” and need to be regarded as “status quo” figures; an appointee whose only qualification seems to be that she is the wife of a state senator and who “makes few remarks” and is “an unlikely candidate to shake up the power structure”; and an attorney who is satisfied with making “technical tweaks to UVA’s governance system” and who “has never asked questions during open board meetings that might challenge the administration’s practices.” Of the 14 Youngkin appointees, only four “have asked probing questions of the Ryan administration.”

Those hoping for a change of direction on the UVa Board of Visitors may not have taken into consideration that, as Steve Haner, put it: “The Youngkin Administration doesn’t share your passionate desire to overthrow the status quo.” Or, as I characterized it last year, Youngkin is “all hat and no cattle.”

As the title of Jim’s article implies, the critics of UVa have one more chance. The appointments of Hardie (Rector) and Brown (Vice-Rector) expire next June 30. Hardie is not eligible for reappointment; Brown is eligible for another term. The custom is for the Vice-Rector to be elevated to Rector when the position is open. The big questions are: Will Youngkin reappoint Brown to the Board? If he does, will the members select him to be Rector or will they pass him over?

Given what seems to be the critics’ current mood, it may not be any solace that the “ghost” of Glenn Youngkin will dominate the Board during a Spanberger administration.