191 UVA Faculty Materially Mislead the UVA Community

Prejudiced Professors Fail to Do Their Homework

A letter signed by 191 University of Virginia faculty members accuses the Board of Visitors of running a "sham" process, engaging in “hasty” behavior, and conducting a  “secretive" search in selecting Scott Beardsley as UVA's next President. These are serious charges leveled against serious people. They deserve serious scrutiny.

They don't survive it.

The letter is a case study in what happens when predetermined conclusions go looking for evidence rather than the other way around. It is riddled with unsubstantiated accusations, embarrassing omissions, and at least one central claim that is provably, demonstrably false, as anyone who bothered to read both Beardsley’s and Jim Ryan’s presidential employment contracts would immediately know.

The UVA community (students, alumni, donors, administrators and faculty who did not sign) deserves to know what this letter actually is: advocacy dressed as scholarship, and sloppy advocacy at that.

The "Poison Pill" That Isn't — The Letter's Most Damning Error

Let's start with the claim that should disqualify the letter's authors from being taken seriously on contract matters: the assertion that Scott Beardsley's employment agreement contains a presidential "poison pill" making it financially catastrophic to remove him.

This is false. It’s not debatable and not a matter of interpretation.

Anyone who reads the Beardsley contract alongside Jim Ryan's contract — which is the minimum due diligence required before making this accusation publicly — would know it immediately. A side-by-side review of the Beardsley and Jim Ryan contracts shows the same termination framework: the same definition of “for cause,” the same two-thirds Board vote requirement, the same one-year salary severance for termination without cause, and the same sabbatical structure. In all material respects, the agreements mirror one another.

The structure is not new. It is neither extraordinary nor a deviation. The reality is that Beardsley's presidential termination package is materially identical to Ryan's. Termination without cause gets him 12 months of salary plus 12 months of sabbatical. Ryan got 12 months of salary plus vested sabbatical. If anything, one could argue that Ryan’s post-presidential faculty terms were more generous: 75% of final presidential salary with no stated time limit, compared to Beardsley’s capped 60% (or Darden Dean salary) and 10-year limit.

The large lump sum, “prohibitively expensive” provision the letter apparently mistakes for a presidential “poison pill” is not a presidential provision at all. It lives in Section F.5 — the section governing Beardsley's post-presidential faculty appointment at Darden. It triggers only if the University terminates his faculty role without cause, a separate employment relationship that doesn't even begin until after his presidency ends. A Board that removes Beardsley from the presidency faces the same financial exposure it would have faced removing Jim Ryan. Period.

To characterize this as a presidential poison pill, you would have to not understand what you are reading, or not have read it at all. Neither is a good look for 191 members of a research faculty.

The Search Firm Nobody Wanted to Mention

The faculty letter raises concerns about the executive search firm involved in Beardsley's selection — framing its role as evidence of irregularity, if not something worse.

What the letter does not mention — and had every reason to know — is that the same search firm was used in the search that produced Jim Ryan's presidency.

Read that again. The firm they are now citing as a marker of a corrupt process is the same firm that found the president they are defending. If its involvement taints the Beardsley search, what exactly does that say about the Ryan search? The omission isn't an oversight. It is a material fact that guts the argument, and its absence from the letter tells you everything about the intellectual honesty of the exercise.

"Unprecedentedly Secretive" — An Accusation That Ignores Reality

The faculty letter's claim that the Beardsley search was unprecedentedly “secretive" collapses the moment you examine it against two inconvenient facts.

First: all presidential searches involve confidentiality. This is not a UVA invention. Candidates for presidencies of major research universities routinely and necessarily require confidentiality — they are sitting leaders at other institutions, and premature disclosure can cost them their current positions. Treating standard practice as unprecedented corruption reveals either ignorance of how these searches work or a willingness to mislead. If anything, this has probably been the broadest and most participatory search committees UVA has ever assembled, complete with a website encouraging public participation.

Second, and far more damning: Jim Ryan's 2022 contract extension was conducted entirely in secret. No faculty consultation. No public notice. No community input of any kind. It was completed as a fait accompli, deliberately structured so the incoming (note: Republican- appointed) Board would inherit it with no meaningful ability to weigh in until their time of service had passed. Where was the outraged faculty letter then? The silence is indeed instructive.

The Real Unprecedented Action — Completely Ignored

The faculty letter wraps itself in concern for precedent and institutional integrity. It says nothing — nothing — about what is arguably the most genuinely unprecedented action in UVA's governance history: the deliberate, failed confirmation of five Board of Visitors appointees, followed by the forced resignation of five more.

Whatever one thinks of the politics, that sequence was historically unprecedented. Nothing even remotely similar has ever happened in the history of the Commonwealth.It dwarfs anything about a presidential search conducted with standard confidentiality. Its complete absence from a letter obsessed with unparalleled behavior is not an oversight. It is a choice — and it reveals that this letter is not about principle. It is about politics and engineering an outcome.

The Provost Searches They'd Rather You Forget

The letter's further concern for shared governance and the new provost search rings hollow against the history it omits. It makes no mention of the most recent provost search (to replace Ian Baucom) that failed — not because of Board interference, but because Jim Ryan rejected the search committee's choice and his preferred candidate was not selected.

It also patently omits the previous process that made Ian Baucom provost in the first place – when Jim Ryan unilaterally hand-picked Baucom with no search committee or stakeholder input on the very same day his predecessor, Liz Magill, resigned.  Process integrity, it seems, only matters when the outcome or candidate is inconvenient to the letter's authors.

Questions the Signatories Owe the Community

Before this letter is accepted as a credible statement from UVA's faculty, some basic questions deserve answers:

Who actually wrote this letter? A document signed by 191 people does not emerge organically from 191 independent voices. Someone drafted it. Someone decided what arguments to make, what facts to include, and — critically — what facts to leave out. Who?

Did the author or authors coordinate with anyone outside the UVA faculty before circulating it? If former administrators, board members, political actors, or others with a stake in the outcome had any role in shaping its content, the signatories and the broader community are entitled to know that. The question is not an accusation. It is a legitimate request for transparency from people who have made transparency their cause.

The Bottom Line

"Sham." “Secretive." These words have consequences. They damage institutions, reputations, and the trust that makes a university function. Deploying them without evidence is not courage — it is recklessness.

The 191 faculty members who signed this letter may be entirely sincere in their concerns. Sincerity is not the issue. The issue is that the letter is rife with material misrepresentations and omissions and perhaps its most central factual claim — the presidential poison pill — is wrong on its face, provable in ten minutes of reading the Ryan and Beardsley contracts side by side. That failure alone should prompt every signatory to ask hard questions about what else they signed without verifying.

The UVA community deserves better than prejudice dressed up as principle — and it certainly deserves better than 191 faculty members who couldn't be bothered to read the contracts before accusing people of corruption. When rhetoric outruns facts, the result is not accountability. It is blatant distortion. The UVA community deserves better than that.