Don’t question university overhead costs or thousands will die!
That is essentially the message of Virginia’s big three research universities — Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University — in response to a National Institutes of Health initiative capping reimbursable overhead costs to 15% of the research grants it dispenses.
And I’m not exaggerating about the “thousands will die” part.
“Lives will be lost due to the corresponding reduction in the pace of biomedical research,” Tech President Tim Sands actually said Monday. So reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
So, what horrendous thing has NIH done at the behest of DOGE meister Elon Musk? It says that for every $100 of a research grant, only $15 can be diverted to cover the cost of university overhead: buildings, labs, IT support, a swarm of administrative staff, and the like. The rest must go to the scientist actually doing the research.
Last year, the NIH disbursed $392 million to Virginia colleges for health research, according to an estimate by the nonprofit Education Reform Now. If their “indirect” funds are reduced to 15%, UVA could lose $39 million, VCU $19 million and Virginia Tech $11 million.
Each point is the January monthly average for Virginia back to the 1890s, per NOAA.
You may be starting to pine for a return to the hottest year evah! A recent data dump from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that January 2025 was in the running for one of the coldest Virginia January average temperatures in more than a century. The graph above captured on their tracking website is clear, and the ranking table the search also creates shows only 19 years out of more than 130 tracked Januarys were colder. Too soon to say the temperature spikes in 2023 and 2024, which were real, will be followed by more normal temps. But that is what weather does, it varies. Were January among the warmest the alarmist media would have been all over this, but the unusual cold is not what they are being paid to report. Bacon’s Rebellion again fills the gap.
In principle, legislation is usually preferable to executive orders. I’m talking at the state and federal level. They can’t be overturned with the flash of a pen by the next executive, for one thing.
This is why Congress needs to act quickly to enshrine President Trump’s executive orders in law.
But when legislators act, they can make things worse.
Case in point: The Virginia General Assembly, currently in Democrat control.
Last summer Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order telling schools that student cellphones must be banned during the school day. Exceptions were carved out for kids with disabilities that might require them to be able to use a phone for emergencies.
For reasons that are unclear, a number of school districts took their sweet time implementing Youngkin’s order, as if it required a great deal of work at the local level to tell the kids to leave their damned phones powered off and in their backpacks.
Next, the General Assembly decided to get in on the act and codify the rule. Democrats even lavished lukewarm praise on the governor, agreeing that cellphones were a distraction and don’t belong in the classroom. Neither do smartwatches.
Excellent! A rare flash of sanity from the far-left kooks in Richmond.
I bring to your attention a flier promoting an event — “Refracting the Black Reproductive” — held at the University of Virginia last week. My intent is not to critique the substance of what Samantha Pinto, an English professor from the University of Texas at Austin, had to say. To discuss her thinking, I would have to understand her… which I do not. Rather my point is to illustrate how the language of academic leftists has gotten so inbred and arcane — and Ms. Pinto is a teacher of English, mind you — that it has become incomprehensible to ordinary Americans.
Here’s how Pinto described what she planned to discuss:
I ask: How might a transnational feminist politics represent the multiple demands on the Black womb through rather than against the tensions of individual and collective rights? How might we turn toward African, Caribbean and US-based Black feminist expressive culture for models of engagement with the reproductive that center vulnerability, ambivalence, uncertainty, disutility, and temporariness, all of which challenge ideals of autonomy and community?
In case you had difficulty deciphering the meaning, the flier contains this helpful context:
For years, they’ve worked as an adjunct to the Democratic National Committee, obediently trotting out talking points and providing their critics with hilarious montages of these mid-wits spouting the exact same lines.
With their heads spinning since Donald Trump became president, the left has latched onto a tired word to characterize what most of us believe to be an energetic swamp draining.
They describe it as “chaos.”
Here’s a small sample of the Democrat lickspittle’s headlines:
Virginia will remain out of step with the rest of the United States on how it taxes service-providing businesses after General Assembly Democrats voted in lockstep to once again kill a logical income tax reform.
There was absolutely no partisan angle to the policy debate, yet party line votes killed it. It is impossible not to consider that one fatal flaw for the idea was that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin supported it and suggested the Assembly make the change. But the idea has been knocking around for years, long before Youngkin. A respected tax department official told the House Finance Committee she had been working on the issue for 15 years.
“It shifts the burden from in-state companies to out-of-state companies,” Kristin Collins of the Department of Taxation told legislators. You would think this would be a bipartisan winner.
The tax rule Democrats rejected by defeating House Bill 1866 in House Finance on January 31 has been adopted by at least 39 of the 48 states that have corporate income taxes. The senate version, Senate Bill 1456, was killed January 28.
Most of the states Virginia competes against for business locations and expansions use what is called “market based sourcing” in calculating the tax on income from services. According to the fiscal impact statement prepared by the Department of Taxation (very detailed, as usual) “none of the states contacted reported an unexpected revenue loss as a result of market-based sourcing.”
Virginia Commonwealth University is one of three universities to have a federal grant canceled in the latest step by the Trump administration to defund Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
The education schools of VCU, California State University-Los Angeles and the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota had received a series of grants under a larger $1 billion Biden administration initiative. Reports The Washington Free Beacon:
Ostensibly meant for teacher training and development, the grants were in fact used to support courses and workshops on DEI concepts—including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “linguistic supremacy”—as well as the establishment of a “social justice” center.
The VCU education school, which has explicitly included “social justice” in its mission statement, hosted workshops on “decolonizing the curriculum” and “becoming an antiracist educator.”
The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) has long stood as a symbol of discipline, leadership, and service. However, recent political disputes over Board of Visitors (BOV) appointments have placed cadets in the crossfire of a battle they neither sought nor deserved.
Former BOV President Tom Watjen, who remains on the Executive Committee, lamented the July 2024 appointees, stating, “I am disappointed in how politicized the board appointment process has become, impacting board experience and continuity.” His concern extends beyond VMI—politicizing governance at the expense of cadets undermines the Institute’s core mission.
Dedicated Leaders Denied Without Justification
Two highly qualified and committed alumni, Quintin Elliott ’85 and Clifford Foster ’93 were appointed to the BOV by Governor Glenn Youngkin in July 2024. VMI Superintendent Maj Gen. Cedric Wins praised their appointments, noting, “Each individual brings a unique set of skills and experiences that will help us continue to move the Institute forward.” Despite their strong credentials, the Virginia Senate rejected their appointments, with the House expected to follow suit, leaving the BOV short of experienced leadership just before one of its three annual meetings.
I just opened my reassessment notice from Henrico County. The assessment of my house is 13.5 percent higher than it was last year!
It is not a grand or fancy house. Just a brick Cape Cod with about 1,300 sq.ft, built in 1955.
It is not the house; it is the neighborhood. Houses stay on the market only a few days and there are almost several offers, many above the listing price. The house next to me sold last year for almost half a million dollars. It too is a brick Cape Cod, but it has a family room addition that mine does not have and it has been extensively renovated inside. In addition, it has a detached garage. None of that applies to me. Nevertheless, that selling price undoubtedly had an effect on my assessment.
If my house could sell for what the county says it is worth, I understand why so many people are having trouble finding something they can afford.
One victim of the Democrats’ winnowing of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointments to state boards and commissions this year was Stanley Goldfarb. The General Assembly nixed 13 appointees in all — an unprecedented number in modern Virginia history, I believe. Most, like Goldfarb, were outspoken conservatives who had demonstrated a willingness to speak out against the “progressive” project in Virginia higher-ed.
Youngkin’s other appointees have kept a low profile for fear of triggering retaliation of exactly the sort that occurred this year. But not Goldfarb. He paid the price for his views. But he was not silenced. He let it all hang out in a column published this morning in the Wall Street Journal.
Youngkin appointed Goldfarb, the founder of the Do No Harm medical organization that combats wokery in the medical field, to the Board of Visitors of Old Dominion University in June. A former associate dean of curriculum of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, he brought impressive credentials to the task. He took his job as board member seriously. And he ran into a brick wall.
The story he tells is shocking. Having observed similar treatment of activist board members at the University of Virginia, though, I don’t find it surprising. When it comes to conservative reformers, ODU’s leadership, like those of many other public Virginia universities, adheres to the mushroom school of management: Keep ’em in the dark, and feed ’em… you know what.
Goldfarb was naive enough to think that he might have something to offer ODU, which had recently absorbed the Eastern Virginia School of Medicine (EVMS) and had no institutional experience managing a medical school. He was particularly interested in understanding how the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion ideology had permeated the institution.
Dominion Energy Virginia’s current offshore wind construction project is one of only four still in the process of building towers and turbines in the wake of an executive order from President Donald Trump. It is also the largest of the survivors, with more planned power output than the other three combined.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) will include 176 turbines and several offshore substations, with a nameplate value of 2,600 megawatts. The other projects still underway at this time are Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts (806 MW), Revolution Wind serving Rhode Island and Connecticut (704 MW) and Sunrise Wind, a New York project with 924 MW.
Vineyard Wind’s construction was interrupted last summer by a defective 351-foot turbine blade that shattered and scattered debris far and wide. Now it is dealing with the revelation that more than 60 additional blades from supplier GE Vernova have a similar flaw and will need to be replaced.
Dominion continues to report a smooth construction process but has announced a cost overrun of $900 million in recent days. Perhaps the thing to note is that Dominion’s project is the only survivor under construction that has among its backers a sitting Republican governor. The other three are in deep blue states. It is also the only one to be owned directly by the utility (now with a non-controlling partner) and thus guaranteed by its captive ratepayers.
Now comes the battle to replace the University of VIrginia’s provost Ian Baucom. The University has assembled a 14-person group to launch a national search, according to an announcement in the UVA house organ UVA Today.
Ian Baucom
The announcement attributed the appointments vaguely to “the University of Virginia,” without identifying specifically who made the selection. An educated guess is that President Jim Ryan picked the members of the search committee, perhaps in consultation with Rector Robert Hardie, his close ally on the Board of Visitors. But that is only an inference.
The announcement gave no clue what criteria “the university” would use in seeking a successor. Baucom was Ryan’s right-hand man who executed his “great and good” agenda to transform UVA in line with social-justice and equity principles. It would surprise no one if Ryan wanted a chief academic officer who would sustain that legacy.
The selection of the second most powerful administrator at UVA could be contentious, however. It is not in the least melodramatic to suggest that the future of UVA’ hangs in the balance.
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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