Bacon's Rebellion

by James A. Bacon

Two days ago, I made the case that the University of Virginia has a shot at becoming the most desirable university in the country to learn, teach and pursue knowledge. To do that, the Board of Visitors must recruit a president and a provost committed to building a faculty nationally renowned for its intellectual diversity. Only if there is pluralism in the professoriate can there arise a free-wheeling academic culture where ideas collide, mutate, propagate, die and synthesize into exciting new forms.

There are many obstacles to achieving such an outcome, both internal and external. The tenure system, though useful for protecting academic freedom, favors seniority and slows turnover. Moreover, many departments have been captured by ideologues, so even when positions open up, hiring committees have no interest in hiring colleagues whose ideas they find unsympathetic. In the political realm, Democratic legislators are mobilizing in defense of academic “freedom” and “autonomy,” by which they mean working to ensure the dominance of those who think like them on fractious culture-war issues.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to change is that conservatives themselves have given so little thought to what “intellectual diversity” means. No one — not Governor Glenn Youngkin, nor the Board of Visitors, nor even conservative intellectuals anywhere, as far as I know — has clearly defined the concept.

They’ll recognize it, apparently, when they see it.

What is the desired ratio in an intellectually diverse faculty between Marxists, leftists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, classical libertarians and free thinkers who can’t be confined to any ideological box? Should we vie for partisan parity, or is it sufficient to break the left’s lock on campus culture? Should there be a 50/50 balance of left and right? Should faculty viewpoints look like — or more to the point, think like — America? Or, as a state institution, think like Virginia?

Then, once we have defined intellectual diversity, how do we attain it?

The potential now exists to make UVA the most exciting university in the country to learn, teach and pursue knowledge.

by James A. Bacon

The departure of President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom suddenly leaves reformers in the driver’s seat at the University of Virginia. Now what? We know what we didn’t like — we didn’t like the reign of social-justice orthodoxy that stifled intellectual diversity and free expression, and we didn’t like the bureaucratic DEI apparatus that enforced the rules with dual standards. But what do we want? What is our vision going forward? Shared expectations of the future are essential as the Board of Visitors searches for a new president and provost.

Perhaps the newly constituted Board under the direction of newly appointed Rector Rachel Sheridan will have that discussion. Previous Boards did not. Most critical meetings were held in closed session. Open meetings were carefully scripted and allowed negligible opportunity for blue-sky thinking. With this column and several to follow, I hope to spark that conversation.

For all of its deficiencies, UVA has a remarkable opportunity — a chance to position itself as the most exciting university in the United States, and thus the world, to study and teach.

That seems an audacious ambition. But consider: We start our journey, if we give credence to the U.S. News & World-Report best universities ranking, as the 24th top university in the country. Our academic programs are held in fairly high esteem. We have rich history and traditions. The Rotunda and Lawn are an unparalleled architectural treasure. We have a $14 billion endowment. We have a AAA bond rating. Those are not bad attributes to start with.