Bacon's Rebellion

  • Teddy Gottwald on the Record with the Washington Post

    Posted on

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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

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    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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    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

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    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.

     

     

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  • An Example of Servant Leadership

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    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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    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • Where’s Jason?

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    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

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    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…)

  • And Then They Came for the Intellectuals II

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Conservatives will rue the day when they permit the federal government to coerce the resignation of any university president, especially one at a state university that answers to its legislature, governor, and citizens.

    Image credit: Chat GBT

    by David Toscano

    Observers of higher education had been predicting that University of Virginia President Jim Ryan might be ousted by U.Va.’s governing board, now controlled by appointees of DEI opponent and Trump ally, Governor Glenn Youngkin. Instead, it was Trump’s Department of Justice that forced Ryan into an early departure.

    The threats were familiar — echoing those aimed at Columbia and Harvard: Conform to our views, or we’ll make it difficult for your institution and students. But unlike Harvard, where the president and board chose to fight, Ryan lacked sufficient support from both U.Va.’s Board of Visitors and the state’s Republican governor to do so. As he wrote in his message to the University community, Ryan wanted to stay but could not “make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”

    Ryan and U.Va. have thus become the latest casualties in a sweeping political campaign against American higher education — arguably the most aggressive in our nation’s history.

    (more…)

  • Binnie Peay, Then Jim Ryan

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    James A. Bacon

    Binny Peay (left), Jim Ryan (right)

    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.

    (more…)

  • Sabato for UVA President. The Board Should Resign.

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Paul Goldman

    When I served on the State Council of Higher Education, academic freedom was a core educational value. Apparently no longer. We learned today the University of Virginia Board of Visitors caved in into President Trump. They him force out UVA President Ryan because the federal government bureaucrats didn’t like what UVA was doing. 

    When I served on the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) board, I was the lone voice standing up for academic freedom against bullying state government. At least I understood why the others were against me. They feared taking on state officials. 

    Unfortunately, I was naïve. I didn’t realize academic freedom had a financial price in Virginia’s higher education system.

    Money talked, not academic freedom. 

    It’s OK, apparently, to the lecture poor people and the less fortunate about how they should stand up for their rights at all costs.

    (more…)

  • Ryan Resigns

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Jim Ryan

    by James A. Bacon

    Under pressure from the Department of Justice, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan has submitted his resignation to resolve a DOJ investigation into the University’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, reports the New York Times. The Board has accepted Ryan’s resignation.

    In a letter to Rector Robert Hardie, Ryan said that he had planned to step down at the end of the next academic year but “given the circumstances and today’s conversations,” he had decided with “great sadness” to tender his resignation, according to a source whom the Times said was briefed on the contents of the letter.

    On March 7 the Board ordered Ryan to dissolve its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs and end all racial preferences. Due to frustratingly slow compliance, the Board followed up by tightening oversight over his efforts. On April 28 the Civil Rights division sent a letter demanding evidence that the University had complied with the March resolution. Governor Glenn Youngkin read the Board the riot act, demanding action on DEI, and Democratic Party legislators jumped into the picture by rejecting Youngkin’s nomination of board member Ken Cuccinelli, an act that quickly grew into a constitutional controversy as the legislators and the governor disagreed over whether they were empowered to do so.

    Yesterday the Times reported that the DOJ officials had demanded Ryan’s resignation based on conversations with three anonymous sources who had been “briefed on the back-and-forth between the University and the Justice Department” but did not want to be identified discussing “negotiations that were supposed to remain private.” In retrospect, it is clear that the negotiations centered on the terms and conditions of Ryan’s departure.

    It was unclear when Ryan will leave, the Times reported. In the letter, he said the resignation would be effective “no later than August 15, 2025.”

    (Read more to see updates.)

    (more…)

  • Gerber Vindicated

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    James A. Bacon

    Scott Douglas Gerber, a current Virginia resident and occasional contributor to Bacon’s Rebellion, reached a settlement with Ohio Northern University that includes reinstatement to his job and complete vindication to his reputation.

    ONU terminated his employment as a tenured law school professor after he objected to the University’s race-based hiring practices. ONU sent campus security and armed police officers into his classroom to forcibly remove him, according to America First Legal, which represented him in his litigation.

    Aside from allowing him to retire at his “rightful faculty rank” with all benefits intact, ONU formally acknowledged that Gerber was never a risk to anyone in the ONU community, never acted with moral turpitude, and provided “outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service” throughout his tenure.

    Under the terms of the settlement, according to the Bluffton Icon, Gerber submitted his retirement letter ending his employment. Both sides agreed not to disparage one another, and Gerber agreed not to publish a memoir entitled, “Cancelled.”

    Gerber, a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, recently criticized his alma mater for its DEI policies, which we republished here.

    You know what would be cool — if the UVA School of Law hired Gerber. You know… to demonstrate how committed it is to intellectual diversity.

  • Make Virginia Elections About Virginia, Not Trump

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    No Kings protest in Petersburg. Image credit: USA Today

    by Derrick Max

    Senator Tim Kaine recently sent out a fundraising email where he quoted the Washington Post that the Virginia “elections are seen as a referendum on the Trump administration.” This suggests that voters should cast their ballots based on how they feel about our current President, rather than the pressing issues facing our Commonwealth today. This kind of rhetoric may play well with partisan crowds and national talking heads, and it may attract donors, but it does a disservice to Virginia voters who deserve a debate focused on real leadership on state issues, not recycled grievances about the President’s agenda.

    With the primary elections behind us, it should be clear: Donald Trump was not on the ballot, and he will not be on the ballot in November. What is going to be on the ballot is the direction of our Commonwealth — critical decisions about Virginia’s economy, energy availability, education and schools, taxes, public safety, infrastructure, and the role of government in our daily lives.

    These are not abstract questions; they are concrete policy choices that will affect every Virginian regardless of party affiliation. And, as the President drives more decisions and control down to the states – state policy should be the primary concern of Virginia voters now more than ever.

    (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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