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Bacon Meme of the Week
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UVa Spending on Staff Surges, Spending on Students Trails
Inflation-adjusted percentage increase of UVa E&G expenditures (in millions of dollars) compared to those of all 15 Virginia public four-year higher-ed institutions. by James A. Bacon
Always alert for opportunities to arm the University of Virginia Board of Visitors members with statistics they don’t see in their board presentations, The Jefferson Council presents the table above, compiled from data published by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).
The takeaway: UVa boosted overall E&G (educational & general) spending faster than Virginia’s other public four-year colleges and universities between fiscal 2011-12 and fiscal 2021-22, but UVa funds were more likely to flow to faculty and staff and less likely to go to student instruction, student services, or research support.
E&G expenditures represent spending on an institution’s core educational mission. Under SCHEV’s accounting methodology, E&G strips out spending on athletics, dormitories, food service, and auxiliary enterprises. The Council’s data portal adjusts for inflation over the 10 years displayed above, so these figures reflect real spending, not funny money.
SCHEV breaks down E&G expenditures by seven broad categories so the public can get a clearer idea of where the money is going. The data are consistent with the interpretation advanced by The Jefferson Council in previous posts that UVa has experienced excessive growth in administrative overhead. (more…)
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Which Virginia Taxes Have Grown and How Much
Click for larger view. By Steve Haner
What a difference just four years has made in Virginia’s financial condition, with the state’s General Fund tax revenue having increased 31% during the period and its Commonwealth Transportation Fund revenue increasing by almost 36%. This is comparing the annual results for the fiscal years ending June 30, 2023, just released, and the same summary for the year ending June 30, 2019. (more…)
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Improper Parking and Other Unlikely Tales
by Joe Fitzgerald Drunk driving and gerrymandering don’t usually go hand in hand, but there are exceptions. The race-based district-drawing skills of Virginia Democrats half a century ago had areas around majority black Petersburg represented in the state Senate by a rural Democrat from Windsor, 50 miles east. When the state senator got a DUI on his home turf, fickle memory tells me, the hearing was too far away for the local paper to send a reporter.
The charge was probably reduced to improper driving. That’s a standard go-to when the various officers of the court know a guy was drinking but don’t think driving under the influence can be proven. I covered the case in Sussex County in 1984 of a man who had passed out, driven his car into a ditch, and slid over against the passenger door. He admitted to the officer who found him that he had been driving the car when it ran off the road. (more…)
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Youngkin Won’t Rule Out White House Run
by Patrick HouckIt’s not so much what he’s saying but what he’s consciously leaving out.
Campaigning for Republican candidates in the state’s General Assembly, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin declined to answer Fox News Digital’s polite but provocative question about a potential White House run next year.
According to inside sources, Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch has heavily lobbied Youngkin to run for the Republican nomination. While Youngkin demurred when asked about 2024, he had plenty to say about Virginia’s November elections.
Speaking to Fox News Digital from a campaign event in Manassas, he said, “The most important election in the nation, I believe, is Virginia this year. We are laser-focused on holding our House, winning our Senate and getting [state Senate candidate] Bill Woolf and the other great Republican candidates elected.” (more…)
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Blue on Blue
Monica Lisle Monica Lisle, a long-serving Alexandria police captain, has charged the city’s police chief with denying her a promotion to assistant chief by stacking the deck against her in favor of Black candidates in order to “fill certain unannounced racial quotas.”
As Lisle wrote in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint last year, according to The Washington Post, “I believe that Chief [Donald] Hayes believes that diversity is specific to African Americans,” Lisle wrote in a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) last year. “I am a member of at least three protected classes, as a gay, woman, over the … age of 40.”
“Had the process not been flawed like it was, she would have been promoted,” said Damon Minnix, president of the Alexandria chapter of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association, adding that police department morale has suffered as a result. At full complement, the Alexandria police are authorized to have 322 sworn staff. In March, according to The Patch, there were 70 vacancies. (more…)
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Changes in Student Populations and Choices of Majors in 4-Year Colleges and Universities 2010-2023 Challenge Virginia Schools
Virginia Union University by James C. Sherlock
Tastes change, and with them trends.
Between fall 2010 and fall 2021, total undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in America decreased by 15% percent (from 18.1 million to 15.4 million students).
In Virginia’s 4-year public colleges and universities, the drop was 8% in that same period, right at the national average for state schools.
Virginia’s HBCU’s, except for the highest ranked, Hampton University, have fought the trend and increased their student populations dramatically recently.
The Great Recession baby bust arrives as a freshman student cliff in 2025.
National trends. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data on enrollment in undergraduate majors in 4-year public and private institutions of higher education (IHEs) show significant shifts in majors between 2010 and 2023.
There are winner and loser programs, with implications for staffing and perhaps offering a data basis for my magnet schools suggestion.
Between 2010 and 2023, undergraduate majors in:
- liberal arts and social sciences continued to decline;
- engineering majors have been in serious decline since 2019;
- health professions and related programs, having seen huge increases between 2010 and 2019, and physical sciences with smaller increases in those same years, since then are in decline;
- technology continues to gain, even faster since 2019, possibly signaling a shift from engineering to technology majors for the same types of students;
- Psychology, flat between 2010 and 2019, is in a major uptrend since.
Adjustments within higher education are clearly necessary to accommodate the declines in student populations, the coming student cliff and shifting educational preferences by students.
Rational adjustments are clearly identifiable but rarely seen in practice. Because administrations and faculty oppose them. The ramifications: (more…)
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Virginia Beach School Board Gives Parents the Middle Finger
Jen Franklin, Virginia Beach School Board member by Kerry Dougherty
Virginia Democrats.
Has there ever been a more arrogant bunch?
In 2020 they were convinced that they had turned Virginia bright blue. They believed there would never be another Republican in the Governor’s Mansion. They believed they had a license to implement a smorgasbord of far-left policies.
For example, they wanted to allow boys who pretend they are girls into school areas previously reserved for females only.
They wanted to make sure that boys could shower with the daughters and granddaughters of Virginians in high school locker rooms. They wanted boys prowling around girls’ bathrooms and tampons in boys’ rooms.
Worse, they wanted schools to alienate children from their parents by allowing troubled kids to switch genders in school without telling parents. They wanted to force teachers to use whatever wacky pronouns students desired.
The all-blue General Assembly wanted to make sure that these radical school policies were implemented in every corner of the commonwealth, not just in the liberal metropolitan areas.
So they blithely passed 22.1-23.3 Treatment of Transgender Students. (more…)
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Broken Doorknobs, Broken Locks
Memorial to Jwanta Scarbor. Photo credit: The Virginian-Pilot Last year Jwanta Scarbor, a resident of public housing in Norfolk, was found shot to death in her apartment. Now her mother has filed suit against the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority on the grounds that it failed, despite repeated requests, to fix broken doorknobs, locks and windows.
“My family is destroyed,” Tawanda Scarbor told The Virginian-Pilot. “Literally destroyed.”
The killing remains unresolved, according to Norfolk police. There is nothing in the article to suggest that malfunctioning locks and doorknobs allowed the killer access he would not have been granted otherwise. Regardless, it is not unreasonable for tenants to expect landlords to maintain basic security features in proper working order.
It is entirely legitimate to ask why the Norfolk public housing authority did not, or could not, respond in a timely manner to requests for apparently simple repairs. This is not an isolated incident. Poor maintenance of public housing seems to be a systemic problem. Why is that? (more…)
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Virginia’s Balance Sheet is Embarrassingly Strong
Virginia is floating on a sea of unspent cash, but tax relief fails again. By Steve Haner
“Our balance sheet couldn’t be stronger…this is our moment to soar.”
So said Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin Wednesday. Every year, our governors come to the legislature to report on the end of the fiscal year financial result, and often they say something like that. They always prefer to bring a happy message over one of caution or doom.
This time, however, it is true. (more…)
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Skating Past FOIA in Harrisonburg
by Joe FitzgeraldPublic officials will sometimes self-censor their emails, memos, and even texts for fear they’ll be embarrassed or caught telling the truth if a Freedom of Information request is filed. You’d think that caution would make them better communicators. Recent history proves that’s not the case. Sometimes it seems the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, instead frees them to do the bare minimum.
The often unjustified fear of information requests, para-FOIA, ignores how infrequent the requests are, not to mention how vanishingly rare convictions for violations are. Enforcement is by the officials covered by the law, and prosecution is up to the citizen. The real danger, if you can call it that, is a phrase or observation FOIA-ed and ripped out of context and going viral on social media. But in general the people who will do that find it easier to just make stuff up. (more…)
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Webb’s Last Ditch Attempt to Save the Confederate Memorial at Arlington
The Confederate Memorial in Arlington.
(Arlington National Cemetery photo by Rachel Larue)by Shaun Kenney
Former Virginia Democratic U.S. Senator Jim Webb is begging federal officials to save the last remaining Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in a forceful op-ed to The Wall Street Journal. Webb writes:
[President William] McKinley understood the Civil War as one who had lived it, having served four years in the 23rd Ohio Infantry, enlisting as a private and discharged in 1865 as a brevet major. He knew the steps to take to bring the country fully together again. As an initial signal, he selected three Civil War veterans to command the Cuba campaign. Two, William Rufus Shafter, given overall command of the Cuban operation, and H.W. Lawton, who led the Second Infantry Division, the first soldiers to land in the war, had received the Medal of Honor fighting for the Union. The other, “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, the legendary Confederate cavalry general, led the cavalry units in Cuba, after being elected to Congress in 1880 from Alabama and working hard to bring national reconciliation.
Four days after the Spanish-American war ended, McKinley proclaimed in Atlanta: “In the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers.” In that call for national unity the Confederate Memorial was born. It was designed by internationally respected sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, who asked to be buried at the memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. On one face of the memorial is the finest explanation of wartime service perhaps ever written, by a Confederate veteran who later became a Christian minister: “Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.” (more…)
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Charlottesville Schools Ban Student Cell Phones
A Yondr cell phone pouch. by James A. Bacon
The Charlottesville public school system has banned the students’ use of cell phones. Superintendent Royal Gurley decries students’ “addiction” to the mobile devices, and teachers have complained that the phones have become a tremendous disruption in the classroom, reports The Daily Progress. The restrictions, school officials hope, will “increase connectivity between classmates and teachers improve mental well-being.”
Predictably, some parents are pushing back.
“It’s too extreme,” M.J. Smith, whose son is a senior at Charlottesville High School, told The Daily Progress. “I think it’s in the right place, but it comes across as heavy-handed and not well thought out in light of the active anxiety that the community is facing with another school year and active shooter robocalls. We’re all worried about that.”
I’ve got some questions for parents opposed to the ban. (more…)
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Student Vets Win Back Their Space
Military memorobilia at the Veterans Center. Photo credit: WVIR-TV by James A. Bacon
The Student Veterans of America (SVA) at the University of Virginia notched up a small win Friday when Student Affairs officials reversed a decision to expropriate some of the Veterans Center space at Newcomb Hall. But the veterans’ battle for recognition and respect at UVa is far from over.
What they need most, student veterans say, is for Student Affairs to designate someone with specialized knowledge of the G.I. Bill and other veterans issues to help them through UVa’s bureaucratic maze.
Veterans comprise a tiny fraction of the undergraduate student body at UVa. SVA leadership estimates there are only 60 veterans among the 17,000 undergraduates. That count may not have identified every undergraduate veteran, but Tomas De Oliveira, president of the club, says it represents most.
“It’s a chicken-or-egg problem. There aren’t enough vets to justify a significant commitment of UVa resources,” De Oliveira says. But the lack of support makes it difficult to recruit veterans cycling out of the military. UVa vets have friends. Word gets out. “Why would I recommend UVa?” (more…)
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Deja Vu, All Over Again
Cluster development in western Loudoun Co. Photo credit: Washington Post by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Today’s Washington Post has an article about efforts to preserve farmland in Loudoun County.
That headline instantly took me back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when there was a flurry of activity regarding the need to preserve farmland and provide landowners incentives to keep their farmland from being developed.
Loudoun County was in the center of that activity. At that time, the population of the county was about 57,000. Development in the area near Dulles Airport and the Rt. 7 corridor was in the early stages. A large part of the county was open land, consisting of large estates, as well as medium and small farms. The tools for preserving that land that were being discussed, sometimes heatedly, were conservation easements and transfer of development rights. A sample report of some of those studies is here. (more…)
