HOW UVA BECAME ONE OF THE MOST LIBERAL UNIVERSITIES
IN THE COUNTRY
A new national ranking places UVA among the 25 most liberal colleges in the country — and a 2026 FIRE study offers an even more revealing statistic: UVA students identify as liberal rather than conservative by a 5.29-to-1 ratio, one of the highest disparities among major public universities. But UVA wasn't always this lopsided. How did we get here — and what would it take to restore genuine intellectual diversity at UVA?
Two shootings, two separate public university responses
UVA commissioned two reports on the 2022 shooting that killed three of its students, then released them so heavily redacted that large stretches are unreadable. In fact, roughly fifty pages across the two reports contain nothing at all — a header, a page number, the alleged code exemption, and white space. What’s more, UVA took 28 months to publish their reports. Old Dominion University (ODU), faced the same situation four months ago and did the opposite.
Will the public demand the transparency it deserves?
What the strategic plan says, and Doesn’t say
President Beardsley's decision to formulate a new long-term strategic plan for UVA is a welcome one. The "key early priorities" President Beardsley has announced are, for the most part, generic no-brainers. But the most telling thing about President Beardsley's list are the two key priorities it leaves out: the degradation of our famed Honor System and the critical lack of thought diversity on Grounds.
UVA’s FIRST-YEAR ENGAGEMENT COURSES DIVIDE, NOT UNITE
The first year of college is supposed to do one thing above all: take a class of 18-year-olds from every background imaginable and forge them into a single community. That used to be the point of a shared first-year experience. UVA's Engagements program does the opposite. Instead of bringing disparate students together around a common intellectual foundation, it sorts them into courses organized almost entirely around race, gender, and identity — teaching incoming students to see each other first as members of competing groups, not as classmates.
DEI BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL AS NOXIOUS
UVA has submitted two compliance certifications to the Department of Justice affirming that it has dismantled its DEI apparatus. But a review of University records suggests a different story. From vice presidents to assistant deans, many of the officials who once led DEI initiatives remain in place under new titles and reorganized offices. Was UVA's DEI infrastructure dismantled—or merely rebranded?
Updates from
The Jefferson Council
PAVING THE WAY FOR CIVIL DIALOGUE AND INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY at UVA
Read what’s on our radar
UVA has fallen into a monoculture that rejects the free exchange of competing ideas. Check out the stories that you might not hear from the official channels.
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