Bacon's Rebellion

  • Bacon Bits: A UVA Roundup

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    A hearty round of self-congratulations. Scott Gerber, the law professor who was canceled by Ohio Northern University but vindicated in a recent legal settlement, is still cranking out op-eds. (We have republished a couple here on Bacon’s Rebellion.) In the Washington Times today, he offers some acute observations about the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. He questions Governor Glenn Youngkin’s expression of “complete confidence” in a board that for three months tolerated President Jim Ryan’s foot dragging in dismantling Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and stonewalling the Department of Justice investigation into racial preferences and DEI.

    What does UVA’s board do? Seemingly little more than congratulating one another for what the members claim is their own terrific work. Indeed, at the June meeting, the board delivered no fewer than six standing ovations, all of which were in recognition of so-called jobs well done. For example, Mr. Hardie and Vice Rector Carlos Brown received separate standing ovations at the request of each other, with Mr. Brown going so far as to call Mr. Hardie “the hardest working rector in higher education.”

    Ouch! One can argue that the mutual back-slapping was all in the spirit of collegiality. No need for hard feelings! After all, every board member did give generously of his or her time. But the camaraderie did seem pro forma and a bit forced for a bitterly divided board.

    An outstanding job? On June 30, outgoing Rector Robert Hardie and incoming Rector Rachel Sheridan issued a joint statement praising the just-resigned President Ryan for his “outstanding record” as president. Stated the communique published in UVA Today:

    (more…)

  • Pay Virginia’s Leaders Top Pay for Top Results

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kenrick Brown

    The Governor of Virginia earns $175,000, which is less than the President of UVA, who made $912,200 in 2024. In an age afflicted by crises, chaos, and widespread disorder, this mismatch is not just embarrassing — it’s potentially compromising and destabilizing.

    This stark pay disparity underscores a far deeper issue: top-ranking Virginia public officials are grossly under-compensated given the gravity of their work. Notably, senior public sector officials bear greater moral responsibility than the vast majority of their C-suite private sector counterparts. This truth is especially profound as Virginia is home to a wide array of defense, Intelligence Community, and national security facilities and infrastructure. The General Assembly’s refusal to act reflects a terrible moral failing and a direct threat to effective governance. Low compensation weakens ethical standards and erodes governing competence across the Commonwealth. Consider this: it’s easier to bribe an official making $175K than one making $1.75M — or $17.5M.

    Not since January 14, 2006 — nearly two decades ago — has gubernatorial compensation been raised. 

    (more…)

  • How to Craft a Happy Ending from the Ryan Saga

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Paul Goldman

    “[For] me, the promise of America is equal opportunity for every individual.”

    This is a core belief for axed University of Virginia President Jim Ryan. Read his best-known book. Most sensible Virginia Democrats would agree. Most sensible Virginia Republicans too. Ironically, the quote itself actually didn’t come from Ryan. Or any Virginia Democrat or Republican either. Rather it comes from the key Trump Administration lawyer who helped force the UVA President to resign. 

    In justifying Ryan’s ouster, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillion said the following: 

    “[The] federal government got pretty aggressive in going in and saying, no, sorry, after Brown v. Board of Education you have to allow equal opportunity for all people in the United States... To me, the promise of America is equal opportunity for every individual.”” 

    I find her reference to the Brown case most fascinating for this legal reason: Brown v. Board of Education doesn’t apply to higher education! 

    The case (actually, there were two separate decisions) applied to K-12 public education. Virginia was a losing defendant.

    Surely, Dhillon knows that. She was a top student at UVA law school. Her words are thus clear: The Trump administration wants to apply the equal opportunity principle in public schools from kindergarten to post doctorate.

    (more…)

  • Seriously?

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Virginia Mercury headline: “After UVA president’s exit, Dems say they want to prevent further politicization of higher education.”

    Omitted from the article: Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said Saturday that he’s prepared to nuke all of Governer Glenn Youngkin’s nominations to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors in the next General Assembly session, and warned the board not to select a new president until next year (when Democrat Abigail Spanberger might be governor).

    And Democrats are worried about the politicization of higher ed?

    In its crafting of a new pseudo-narrative, the Mercury cited multiple examples of Youngkin efforts to dismantle DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) in Virginia’s public higher-ed institutions — as if the battle over DEI in higher ed started with Youngkin.

    (more…)

  • Ken Whitley: Local Hero

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    James A. Bacon

    by Harry Minium

    Ken Whitley. Image credit: Kerry: Unemployed and Unedited

    Hero is a term that is so overused that it seems at times to have lost its meaning.

    You’re not a hero if you do the right thing. That makes you a good person.

    You’re only a hero if you do the right thing when it takes courage to do so.

    By that definition, Ken Whitley was a hero as a 15-year-old freshman at Norview High School.

    It was 1959 and Norfolk was a segregated city. A federal judge had ordered that Norfolk’s schools be integrated. Seventeen brave African-Americans, all hand-picked by the NAACP, enrolled in previously all-white schools.

    Many white students objected going to school with Black kids and they shunned, hassled and sometimes beat the unwelcome newcomers.

    James Turner Jr. was one of the 17 and enrolled at Norview, along with his friend, Andy Heidelberg. One morning, as Whitley got off a school bus and began to enter Norview, he saw six white kids beating Turner.

    Hundreds of students were gathered around, some laughing and jeering. Only Whitley came to his aid.

    “Six on one? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right,” Whitley told me a few years ago.

    So, he threw his books down, got a running start and started grabbing guys and slinging them to the ground.

    Any one of you who wants to fight after school, show up here and I’ll kick your ass, he yelled at the six guys, who slinked away.

    Whitley was a stud athlete who would start at fullback and linebacker for the 1959 Norview state championship team and also wrestled. No one messed with Whitley. He was Turner’s guardian the rest of the year. Continue reading.

  • Republicans Need Permanent Campaign Model to Flip Virginia Red

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Restoration News

    Why aren’t more conservative strategists adopting the Permanent Campaign Model? We asked American Majority Action’s Ned Ryun for the blueprint.

    by Hayden Ludwig

    Virginia’s race for governor is shaping up to be the most consequential race of 2025 and a bellwether for the 2026 midterms. Lose those and we put President Trump’s entire America First agenda in jeopardy, inviting endless stalling and impeachment hearings by Democrats.

    Ned Ryun is trying to prevent that.

    “We can’t run like it’s 2005 if we’re serious about beating the Left—and I hope conservatives are as serious about winning as we say we are,” he told Restoration News in an exclusive interview.

    Getting serious means running a permanent campaign

    Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority Action, which trains conservative leaders, and the nation’s leading expert on what’s called the “permanent campaign” — building the infrastructure to prime Republican voters not days, but years in advance of Election Day. That requires coordinated voter registration, message microtargeting, and maximal early voting turnout—whether it’s in-person or by absentee ballot.

    “Virginia has 45 days of early voting,” Ryun explained. “If Democrats are banking votes in mid-September, Republicans can’t wait until November 4 to start turning out the vote. They have to start now — or better yet, years ago.”

    (more…)

  • Teddy Gottwald on the Record with the Washington Post

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    James A. Bacon

    Teddy Gottwald

    Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff with the Washington Post is writing an update about the Virginia Military Institute based on the news peg of Teddy Gottwald’s tenure as president of the VMI Board of Visitors coming to an end tomorrow. Rosenzweig-Ziff submitted questions to Gottwald by email. I publish those questions — and answers — before the Post article comes out so that, as Gottwald suggests, readers can “judge for themselves the fairness of the finished product.” — JAB

    Dan,

    Please see below the answers to your questions. I have worked to get this to you today so that if you have any follow up questions you can ask before my term ends on Monday. The President is the spokesperson for the BOV, so that too will end for me after tomorrow.

    You mention in your questions that you have seen MG Wins’ email he sent me last Tuesday in which he discusses what he believes is my agenda. Since you mentioned this, you should know that I don’t agree with any of the claims, and I believe the BOV meeting records which are available online for anyone to view do not support those claims. I especially disagree with implications that I am against diversity and for prioritizing confederate statues and ask one to look at the BOV records on this. 

    Under the leadership of John Adams and then me, our BOV has been careful this year not to react in haste to what we hear from Washington, and we have not made any changes as a result of new Federal input. Before we will take any action, our Executive Committee will examine the law and all VMI activities to make sure we’re in full compliance, and only then will we determine if any changes are needed. 

    Update: Gottwald answers a follow-up round of questions, which I have appended to the end of the column. — JAB

    (more…)

  • The Democrats Respond

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Bedlam compounded.

    by Gordon C. Morse

    A long time ago, in a city far, far away (Richmond during the 1970s) there existed AM radio station WGOE. It combined the progressive rock of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart with a collection of on-air personalities who you knew – just knew – were stoned from morning to night. Minutes of dead air would go by when you heard nothing at all, save a scratchy needle hitting the end of a record, and finally someone would push the right button.

    That was the quality of Saturday morning’s Virginia Senate Democratic Caucus on-line press conference. It was something less than a public confidence-builder.

    It did answer one question: How do we take the UVA situation –- a university presidency soon to be vacated and the leadership of its all-important health care system already driven off –- and make things much, much worse not only for the University of Virginia, but also for Virginia higher education generally?

    Answer: Blow up everything. Clean house. Reboot all the boards of all Virginia’s colleges and universities. Yeah, come January, just machine gun everyone in sight and burn down their homes. So spake Scott Surovell, the Senate Majority Leader.

    (more…)

  • Who’d Want to Be President of UVA Now?

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with a University of Virginia alumnus that has stuck with me. This man, a major donor who had given his time and wisdom on various boards, was concerned about the direction UVA had taken under President Jim Ryan but cautioned against any effort to remove him. Ryan was not dogmatic. Rather he was “malleable” and could be reasoned with, the alumnus suggested. Additionally, he noted, sacking Ryan would follow the firing and reinstallation of Teresa Sullivan as UVA president in 2012. Any qualified candidate would have to wonder if there was something toxic in the water in Charlottesville. Who’d want the job?

    That was two years ago, back when the idea of removing Ryan seemed so remote that very few took it seriously. It was before the Trump administration launched an investigation into racial preferences at UVA that led to Ryan’s resignation, sparking a backlash among Democrats. It was before state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, declared that if UVA board members knew what was good for them, they’d better wait until Virginia had a new governor (presumably Democrat nominee Abigail Spanberger) to pick a new president. It was, in other words, before the battle for UVA’s soul became a hyper-partisan fracas.

    Finding a candidate capable of meeting UVA’s high expectations will be only more difficult now.

    Under better circumstances, UVA’s board would appoint an interim president — typically the provost — to run things while a national search was underway. But the provost, Ian Baucom, resigned this spring to take a job as president of Middlebury College.

    (more…)

  • New Governor, New Chance to Actually Improve Education

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    By Chris Braunlich

    It shouldn’t be hard for both political parties to agree that among those who suffered most from covid school shut-downs were low-income children.

    In the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the assessment against which all states judge their progress, the percentage of Virginia students scoring at proficient or above in the 2024 NAEP exams demonstrate a huge gap between those who are low-income and those who are not – a gap ranging between 25 and 30 percentile points.

    For NAEP, proficiency indicates not only solid academic performance and competency, but also the ability to apply that knowledge in real-world situations. Achieving it has been linked to better long-term outcomes, including higher graduation rates and increased job earnings — goals parents wish for their children and for which students should strive.

     

     

    (more…)

  • An Example of Servant Leadership

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Chap Petersen

    In the fall of 1991, I had just entered UVA Law School after a year in Japan. My first act on arriving in Charlottesville was to join the University rugby team. (I had played in college and Japan). Grad students comprised the “A side” of the UVA team and, yes, we had some very good players.

    One of the best was a diminutive halfback from Yale. Fearless and lightning fast, he led our attack and scored lots of tries. He was also self-effacing and quiet off the pitch; it was several weeks before I learned that my teammate “Jimmy Ryan” was the #1 ranked student in his Law School class and headed to a prestigious clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court.  

    That UVA squad made it to the state final, losing a close match to Norfolk RFC. Here’s a close- up of our team photo, just after that loss. (Ryan is standing in the second row; I’m kneeling in the front).  

    Photo credit: Chap Petersen

    Years later, I ran into Jimmy Ryan when he became a professor at the Law School. He had turned down a lucrative career in corporate law to teach young attorneys. Then in 2017, he was named the next President of UVA. A dream job and couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

    (more…)

  • Virginia Senate Dems Have Lost It Over the Ryan Resignation

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Leaders of the state Senate Democratic Caucus held an online press conference Saturday to express their dismay to the resignation of President Jim Ryan as president of the University of Virginia and outline their legislative priorities in the next General Assembly session.

    It was frightening.

    There are two main takeaways: First, Senate Democratic leaders are utterly deluded. Second, based upon those delusions, they are planning an unprecedented power grab over Virginia’s public colleges and universities (which is precisely what they accuse their partisan foes of doing).

    Senate Democrats have no clue what the thinking is behind Youngkin administration and Trump administration actions. They attribute the most malign of motives to their foes, and they often believe to be true things that are not. It is astonishing that people in power are so misinformed about the intentions of their partisan adversaries. It is difficult to imagine how these people might be reasoned with.

    I am not exaggerating. I detail their hallucinations below. And lest you doubt my recapitulation of what they say, view the video, captured by The Cadet, the independent Virginia Military Institute student newspaper.

    The Democrat leaders made one, and only one, legitimately debatable point: that the Department of Justice’s department of Civil Rights engaged in over-reach by negotiating Ryan’s resignation for his failure to adhere to an executive order prohibiting racial preferences and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. I don’t happen to agree with their assessment, but I acknowledge that they are raising a fair point about the raw exercise of executive power — (I might have more to say about this in a future column — and I believe that a public debate would be worthwhile.)

    Their antidote: their own raw exercise of legislative power.

    And it’s all downhill from there.

    (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • Where’s Jason?

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Attorney General Jason Miyares

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    The U.S. Supreme Court, in its eagerness to enhance the power of the presidency, has potentially created a real mess over the question of birthright citizenship. 

    Instead of ruling on the constitutionality of the President’s Executive Order ending birthright citizenship, the Court limited its ruling to the issuance of nationwide injunctions by district courts. The Court ruled that district court judges do not have the authority to issue injunctions affecting persons or entities that were not a party to the case before them. The Court granted the President’s request to stay the nationwide injunctions issued by the district courts, but “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”

    The injunctions in two instances were issued in cases brought by state Attorneys General, suing the federal government over the implementation of the Executive Order. They were granted standing to sue, the district courts issued nationwide stays, and the relevant appeals courts upheld them. Because the Supreme Court order allowed a district court to issue a stay applicable to the plaintiffs in these cases, i.e. the states, the stay will still be effective in those states.

    Maryland was one of the states involved in those suits in which a stay was ordered. So was North Carolina. Virginia was not.

    (more…)

  • Dhillon Defends DOJ Pressure on UVA

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Harmeet Dhillon. Image credit: CNN

    by James A. Bacon

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) tried for three months to get answers to questions about the University of Virginia’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program but never received a substantive answer, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights division told CNN news anchor Jake Tapper.

    “They didn’t respond at all?” Tapper asked yesterday on his cable news show.

    “They asked for extensions and extensions and extensions,” Dhillon replied.

    Dhillon said she’d sent a “sheath of letters of increasing urgency” asking UVA to confirm that it was compliant with Students for Fair Admissions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbidding racial discrimination in university admissions. They didn’t reply, she said. “Today, they still haven’t, almost three months after I started writing letters to the university law school, the medical school, the nursing school, and others. So, that’s really troubling.”

    “I haven’t gotten anything in writing from UVA, unlike many of the other institutions of higher learning,” she said. “I’ve had chancellors come meet me. I’ve had lawyers come meet me. They’ve given us reams and reams of documents. Not UVA.”

    (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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