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.

Caucus Chair Mamie E. Locke, D-Hampton, set the tone at the beginning of the conference with a barrage of cliches. The flurry of President Trump’s executive orders, including those banning racial preferences in higher ed, were “designed to hold this nation and its citizens hostage both figuratively and literally.”

Literally? OK.

She continued: The Department of Justice has become “Trump’s gangster arm, not the servant of the people.” The Trump administration has “weaponized the DOJ” by investigating institutions like the University of Virginia.

This is hyperbole typical of the rhetoric directed at Trump (and by Trump acolytes back at Democrats). You’re free to believe whomever you wish, but the press conference conveys the Democratic Caucus mindset. Virginia’s Democratic Party leaders see themselves in a war between good and evil. Nuance is dead.

Locke’s critique lumped Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares together with the Trump administration in “attacks on academic freedom” based upon “bogus claims” of higher-ed hostility to conservatives, admitting unqualified students, and hiring unqualified faculty.”

Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, built on the theme by suggesting the existence of a Trump-Youngkin conspiracy to get rid of Ryan. “It appears to me,” he said, “that the Youngkin administration coordinated this with the Trump administration as a means to get a president removed who was under contract for another few years. I don’t view this as being something that just sort of rose up and happened when Trump got elected, but I think it was a deliberately coordinated, specifically planned as a way to remove somebody from an institution that a lot of people with a lot of money didn’t like.”

Let’s be clear about something. The critique of higher-ed at the University of Virginia began long before Trump was re-elected president. It arose from real, not imagined, hostility toward conservatives on campus, from the erection of a DEI bureaucracy to enforce policies and procedures inspired by leftwing social-justice ideology, from the application of double standards toward groups favored by that ideology and groups disfavored, from widespread self-censoring and reluctance to speak freely, and from the relentless leftist drift of faculty members and systematic discrimination against conservatives. I have chronicled a vast body of evidence with which Locke appears to be entirely unacquainted.

As for Surovell’s conspiracy theory, he has nothing to back it up beyond his own suspicions. The fact is, the public doesn’t know exactly what happened. Key decisions were made behind closed doors. Other members of the Jefferson Council and I have numerous sources within the Youngkin administration and the Board of Visitors, and we’re still in the dark. To suppose that Surovell has any inside knowledge derived from the Youngkin camp or the Trump camp, is patently absurd. If the Majority Leader has any concrete evidence, he has yet to present it in any forum.

Moreover, Surovell is simply wrong about the one concrete assertion he does make: the insinuation that Ryan was removed because there were “a lot of people with a lot of money” who didn’t like him. Among the Youngkin appointees, Ryan’s strongest supporters were people with a lot of money — like John Nau, a multizillionaire Texas beer distributor and Paul Manning, a multizillionaire Virginia entrepreneur and investor. Ryan’s biggest supporter of all, a Northam appointee and a Democrat, was Rector Robert Hardie, another multizillionaire who happens to be the son-in-law of gazillionaire Republican mega-donor William H. Goodwin. Aside from Bert Ellis, a successful and wealthy serial entrepreneur whom Youngkin fired, the most vocal skeptics — I use the word skeptics because they never spoke critically of Ryan in public — were Doug Wetmore, Paul Harris, and Stephen Long. Though professionally successful, they can hardly be classified as “people with a lot of money.” Surovell’s sociological analysis of the UVA power structure, shall we say, is grievously flawed.

Beyond that, Youngkin never criticized Ryan personally — not in public — and he moved with great caution in creating change at UVA. He never threatened to unseat any of the Northam-appointed board members loyal to Ryan, much less Ryan himself, and when he did move against a board member, it was against one of his own appointees, Bert Ellis, for allegedly ungentlemanly behavior. (Ellis’ enemies dished out far worse calumnies without rebuke.) Ryan insisted upon playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules. Conspiring to force Ryan’s resignation would have been totally out of character.

In my analysis, Youngkin was playing a long game, pursuing an anaconda strategy of slowly and steadily restricting Ryan’s freedom of action and increasing the board’s oversight over him, such as by reviewing his use of discretionary Strategic Investment Fund monies. The Department of Justice initiative came out of the blue. The Youngkin administration and his board appointees were left scrambling to keep up. Had Ryan responded to DOJ’s requests for information, he might well have escaped his fate. But, according to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, UVA repeatedly blew off DOJ. Ryan was viewed as an obstacle to the investigation. His departure came as the result of vaguely described “negotiations” to save UVA from the threatened loss of federal funds. The situation throughout was dynamic and unpredictable, contingent in part upon Ryan’s own actions. There was no conspiracy.

Of course, events at UVA have not unfolded in a vacuum. There have been similar battles over the leadership of the Virginia Military Institute and the board composition of George Mason University, the Virginia Commonwealth University, and Old Dominion University. Clearly, Youngkin has a vision of the kind of change he’d like to see in Virginia higher-ed — more freedom of speech, more intellectual diversity — and he has pursued it across the board. The Trump administration has yet to insert itself into those other battles.

Why did DOJ single out UVA? My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that Dhillon and her deputy Greg Brown are both UVA alumni and had been following developments at their alma mater for a long time. Brown had litigated three cases in which two students and one employee had been treated atrociously, so he knew first-hand how things worked. (Before joining DOJ, Brown attended a Jefferson Council annual meeting. The Jefferson Council referred the three clients to him.)

The Senate leaders were correct to see a concerted effort on Youngkin’s part to eliminate DEI at Virginia’s public universities. They fool themselves, however, to think conservative faculty members aren’t an endangered species, or that, no matter what formal free-speech policies might be in place, students and faculty enjoy free expression on topics that transgress social-justice dogma.

The key to having a reasoned conversation is to understand what the other side is saying. What do your opponents believe to be the facts? What are their philosophical assumptions? What are their goals? What are their arguments? Locke, Surovell and their cohorts have made zero effort to achieve such an understanding. They imposed a partisan narrative on events and then believed their own propaganda.

So, what remedy are they calling for?

Surovell laid out the options. He has already fired a salvo against UVA board member Ken Cuccinelli. A Senate committee nixed the former Republican AG’s nomination by Youngkin and asserted a precedent-breaking power to kill an appointment without a vote of the full General Assembly, as had been almost universally the practice in the past. He ramped up the rhetoric by accusing Youngkin of “not following the law” by refusing to concede to Cuccinelli’s unseating. Surovell cited no word or action by Cuccinelli during his brief tenure on the board as grounds for dismissal, only his reputation from years past as a partisan Republican.

If UVA’s rector continues to recognize Cuccinelli as a board member, Surovell said, “I believe that would constitute malfeasance and incompetence and be a basis for removal by the next governor if that governor so chooses. … Everybody needs to recognize that’s on the table.”

Surovell acknowledged that legislators do not have the power to unseat board members whose appointments had been previously confirmed. But he suggested that the Senate could reject Youngkin’s other nominees in the 2026 session, leaving UVA’s board with only 13 of 17 slots filled. Then the next governor — he’s presuming it will be the Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a UVA alumna — would appoint another tranche in June. At that point, he suggested, Youngkin’s appointees still would constitute a majority. But the following year more Youngkin appointees would rotate off and more Democrats would rotate on, putting Democrats back in control.

Surovell then took the remarkable step of… of… I’m searching for a metaphor here… of holding hostage the UVA presidency.

“It will be a different ideological majority at the University of Virginia next July 1, and I think it’s very important that this new board of visitors does not act rashly,” he said. “This current majority is only going to be in place for about 11 months, and they should not do anything that I think binds the university in any kind of long-term commitments. … If they try to act and install somebody immediately, I think the Senate of Virginia would probably view that as an attempt to undermine legislative control of the body and the future governor’s authority at that institution, so I really hope they don’t install a new president anytime soon.”

(Editorial note: Surovell’s calculations are slightly off. The governor appoints four board members to UVA in his/her first year, four the second year, five the third year, and four the fourth year. Youngkin appointees would retain a working majority for two full years, and they would have the power to vote in a new rector, presumably one amongst themselves, who would serve a two-year term, just as the outgoing Northam appointees did during Youngkin’s term. Youngkin has been in office for three-and-a-half years. Hardie doesn’t step down until Tuesday. Update: Surovell’s math is correct, not mine. If Cuccinelli’s nomination is rejected, and all four Youngkin appointees in the next tranche are rejected, his appointees will have a majority for only one year.)

In reviewing the governance structure for higher-ed in Virginia, Surovell suggested that maybe the legislature should assert the power, which now belongs to the governor, to remove any board member. “Perhaps that’s something we need to look at in January when we come back.”

In sum, motivated in part by a ill-informed fantasy of what’s happening in higher ed and outraged by the perceived power grab of the Trump DOJ, Senate Democrats threaten to undertake a power grab of their own.

Things will get uglier than I could have imagined possible.

James A. Bacon serves on the executive committee of the Jefferson Council. He does not speak for the Council. The views expressed here are entirely his own.