by Scott Gerber

The University of Virginia (UVA) is currently under investigation by the federal government because its administration is attempting to maintain its illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) regime in secret after the Board of Visitors voted in March to dismantle it. The administration is also stonewalling the Board’s April resolution, which called for more viewpoint diversity at UVA.

To his credit, President Jim Ryan introduced a presentation at June’s Board meeting by Interim Provost Brie Gertler by saying the right things: “Viewpoint diversity is near and dear to my heart;” “John Stuart Mill was right when he wrote in ‘On Liberty’: ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that;’” “the clash of ideas is key to a great education and part of the path towards following the truth wherever it might lead;” “free speech and viewpoint diversity … are the foundation for both academic freedom and effective teaching and learning, and so they are the cornerstones of any flourishing university.”

Unfortunately, what happened before and after Ryan’s encouraging words should alarm anyone committed to the true purpose of higher education: intellectual freedom, the pursuit of truth, and the promotion of virtuous citizenship.

For example, when Board member Doug Wetmore expressed concern during a discussion of UVA’s proposed 2025-26 budget that UVA was continuing to spend money on DEI, Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wagner Davis snapped that she was “wildly disappointed” by Wetmore’s remarks. She then rebuked Wetmore and other conservative Board members for immersing themselves in budgetary details. “There is a fine line between governance and management,” she scolded.

If Davis’s impolite remarks to conservative Board members weren’t bad enough, Interim Provost Gertler admitted that she was being “strategic” in her presentation to the Board. Her goal? To convince the Board to allow UVA’s existing liberal faculty to attempt to summarize the conservative position on controversial topics rather than hire conservative faculty to speak for themselves.

Moreover, Gertler had stated earlier in her presentation that Mike Pence was a “controversial” speaker. Once again, Board member Wetmore wasn’t buying it. Not only did Wetmore reject the idea that Pence, the former Vice President of the United States, should be regarded as a “controversial” speaker, but he insisted that UVA needs to have a faculty that attempts to be “balanced.” He added: “There’s an organization that looks at political donations made by employers and at the University, political donations were 95 percent Democrat, five percent Republican … I think there’s a view among some … that there’s not a purposeful effort to try to balance the faculty from a philosophical and political point of view.”

Board members L.F. Payne and Dan Brody agreed. Brody said, “We recognize we have a problem. We’re working on it.”

Unfortunately, I don’t think UVA’s administration is “working on” hiring more conservatives to serve on the faculty. Indeed, despite the Board mandating in its April resolution that a member of UVA’s faculty senate comment on the viewpoint diversity problem at the June meeting, Ryan shut down discussion of the subject before that faculty member had a chance to speak and kicked the can to the summer where he suggested a small group of Board members could discuss the problem informally when the campus is quiet.

Sadly, UVA’s current administration is doing what most higher ed administrators do: promoting discriminatory DEI policies and refusing to hire conservative faculty who would speak out against them. Worse still, UVA’s administration is playing the Board for fools by foot-dragging on a problem that is as obvious as it is easy to solve: UVA needs to hire more conservative faculty so that it can return to Thomas Jefferson’s founding vision of educating students rather than indoctrinating them.

After all, if UVA can spend more than $20 million per year on DEI employees, it can afford to hire conservative faculty, too.

Scott Douglas Gerber, a Fellow at the National Association of Scholars, is the author of, most recently, “Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies” (Cambridge University Press). This article was republished with permission from Minding the Campus.