How UVA Became One of the Most Liberal Universities in the Country
Recently NICHE, an extensive data analytics platform used by families to evaluate and choose among educational institutions, published a list of the 25 most liberal colleges in the country. Most of the schools on the list were the usual suspects — Oberlin, Sarah Lawrence, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, a few SUNY schools. But the one that really stood out was our own UVA, in the #20 position out of 932 schools. While lists such as these are often subject to reasonable scrutiny, they are mostly somewhere in the proverbial ballpark — and UVA's ubiquitous public relations operation constantly cites such lists when UVA rates highly. Perhaps more importantly, for an avid observer such as myself, who has been deep in the weeds on Grounds for decades, the University's appearance on this list is no great surprise.
The fact is that ever since John Casteen stepped down as president in 2010, the two succeeding administrations, particularly the Ryan administration, actively pursued a left-wing socio-political agenda. While these administrations often denied such political motivations, it brings to mind a line from George Orwell's 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Anyone with their eyes open and “ears to the Grounds” could not miss the evidence.
UVA was not always a politicized institution. When I first arrived on Grounds back in the Jurassic age (1966), UVA was an extraordinarily non-political institution, with the student body pretty much equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, a poll of students for the 1968 presidential election found them almost equally split between Nixon and Humphrey. Surprisingly, that pretty much applied to the faculty as well. Even when the first round of politicization hit the Grounds in 1969 in the form of the anti-Vietnam War movement, when the Faculty Senate voted on a measure to remove academic credit from ROTC classes, the vote was split evenly — 50 percent for and 50 percent against.
After American involvement in the war ended in 1973, UVA slowly but surely returned to its traditional emphasis on camaraderie and conviviality among Wahoos, students and faculty alike. However, this began to change with the nationwide emergence of identity politics and group grievances, very much connected with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. With a daughter on Grounds during this period and with my own service on a University board, I was in Charlottesville quite often, and I noticed a marked difference among students and faculty as both groups became much more focused on a progressive agenda. But with a "triple Hoo" (three degrees from UVA) as president — a man who cared more about the University as a seat of learning than as a machine for social change — UVA overall was relatively even-keeled. This would come to an end with President Casteen's departure in 2010 after two decades in Madison Hall.
The University's new president, Teresa Sullivan, had no prior relationship with UVA. It was also apparent rather quickly that she was a seasoned bureaucrat with little vision or leadership skills. Unfortunately, this left the University to be effectively guided by an increasingly radicalized left-wing faculty. That first materialized in a major way during the 2014 Rolling Stone debacle, in which the entire brotherhood of a UVA fraternity was accused, judged, and condemned by the University community for an alleged rape based on the unverified allegations of one student. President Sullivan stood by doing nothing while numerous faculty members demonstrated against and publicly verbally assaulted their own students without credible evidence, even after those students were chased from their own home while it was being vandalized. This was one of the most shameful incidents in UVA history, and the first of many subsequent incidents demonstrating an outrageous institutional double standard based on the race, religion, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, and/or social standing of the students involved. The ultimate outrage was that when the whole incident was shown to be a fraud, neither Sullivan nor any of the offending faculty publicly apologized to the dozens of students affected.
While President Sullivan's failure to protect her innocent students was probably cause in and of itself to replace her, an inept and failed attempt by the Board of Visitors to remove her two years earlier had basically made her bulletproof. She was thus able to further demonstrate her bumbling leadership in the next major event that would enable a further leftward lurch in UVA's recent history. The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally of August 2017 had nothing substantively to do with UVA and occurred when the University was not even in session, but Sullivan's failure to exert appropriate leadership resulted in white nationalists being able to conduct a torchlight march around Mr. Jefferson's Lawn shouting antisemitic epithets. While that was the only real nexus to UVA, the event was very effectively weaponized by a significant faction of the faculty to further push their leftist social justice agenda — a subject that justifies a separate article of its own.
Even though UVA's leftward drift advanced significantly under Terry Sullivan's administration, I feel it fairly safe to say it was not really a major agenda point for her. Rather, it was much more the result of her allowing the most aggressive leftists element of her faculty to run rampant during her presidency. The fact is that at some point during her presidency there were actually three moderately conservative deans — a quarter of the total. The genuinely agenda-based administration was about to be installed at UVA in 2018 with the presidency of Jim Ryan — and within two years there would not be one— zero, zilch, nada—conservative dean at UVA for the rest of his tenure.
Shortly after becoming president, Ryan promulgated his 2019 "Great and Good" strategic plan, a clarion call for the institutional implementation of a progressive social justice agenda. Combined with the George Floyd incident in the spring of 2020 and its national political repercussions, UVA rapidly became a monocultural echo chamber where both students and faculty who opposed the progressive "woke" agenda — characterized by name changes, statue removals, and consistent decision-making based on race, ethnicity, and gender — were afraid to speak out publicly for fear of being canceled. At that point I had been spending a number of months each year while school was in session in a second home we had purchased in Charlottesville. Every week I was conversing with students and faculty members, and I was appalled by the consistent stories I was hearing about the de facto suppression of freedom of expression caused by the Ryan administration's politicization of the Grounds. This led me to write an open letter to Jim Ryan in the fall of 2020, which went viral, and an article for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal discussing the lack of diversity of thought on Grounds and the mortifying suppression of free expression. All of this, of course, was several years prior to our latest lopsided rankings.
I will restrain my usual humility for a moment and state that there is little doubt these writings played a major role in President Ryan's decision to form a new committee on freedom of expression and inquiry in February 2021. I was reluctantly chosen to serve on that committee and was one of two of its twelve members who could possibly be considered right-of-center. My selection was certainly good for University optics. During the committee's lifespan we held a number of open sessions allowing members of the University community to speak to us openly or confidentially. It would be an understatement to say that much of what we heard confirmed what I had been hearing for the past few years.
I would invite readers to examine that testimony themselves. Unfortunately, they cannot. UVA has refused to release the record of those sessions in response to a FOIA request in 2021, citing a presidential "working papers" exemption. A University that had heard reassuring things about the state of free expression on its Grounds would certainly have had every reason to publish them.
The result of our committee's efforts was a UVA version of the Chicago Principles — but as subsequent events would demonstrate, the fruit of our efforts was purely “virtue signaling” by the Ryan administration. Why do I feel comfortable saying that? Because the administration continued to consistently transgress the heart and soul of our statement by institutionally cramming a socio-political agenda, in the guise of DEI, into every nook and cranny of life at UVA, and by treating different groups of students by different standards. The examples could fill a book, and may someday, but here are a few prime examples that have been previously covered:
A number of schools at the University maintained mandated DEI requirements for faculty hiring and peer review.
A medical student who had the temerity to question the validity of the concept of microaggressions was subjected to a Kafkaesque investigation and punishment.
Another student who made a joke off Grounds, on the Downtown Mall in July 2020, was wrongly accused of endangering a so-called marginalized group and was expelled with the expulsion held in abeyance. She was not exonerated even after UVA's own Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights found the allegations to be without veracity. Righting that wrong cost UVA millions of dollars.
A University library employee resigned rather than submit to mandatory critical race theory training.
The Ryan administration offered a virtually non-existent response to the worst outbreak of antisemitism in the history of the University, including no comment at all on brazenly illegal demonstrations by masked protesters.
Of course, UVA's descent into left-wing politicization was highlighted last year by the Justice Department holding Jim Ryan and his administration accountable for numerous DEI policies that were in violation of Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the question is: how did we reach the point where UVA stands out even amid the tide of left-wing activism that has enveloped most US universities and colleges?
In my opinion, a major factor — and perhaps the major factor — is the stunning lack of thought diversity at the University. As far as faculty and administrators go, conservatives are a virtual rounding error. Specific numbers are hard to come by, but after well over a decade in the weeds, my colleagues and I know most if not all of the conservative faculty and administrators. UVA employs over 3,000 full-time faculty in its academic division, and it would be difficult to identify as many as 30 conservatives in that group, although there may be a number hiding fearfully deep in the closet. Could the total reach 100, or about 3 percent?
While that is doubtful, a Daily Progress article written after the 2022 elections found that "UVa faculty and staff favored Democratic candidates over Republican candidates, based on donations, by a ratio of 30 to 1." Although political donations may be only one measure of thought diversity, the finding supports a significant body of anecdotal knowledge accumulated over a decade. So I think it is fairly safe to say that conservatives constitute somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of UVA's faculty and administration. In a so-called purple state that tilts only slightly Democratic, for a state university to tilt so overwhelmingly in one direction is indefensible. And we know the reason why.
While the universe of academic faculty and administrators certainly leans left, there has been absolutely no effort by the past two administrations at UVA even to attempt to create a material balance of thought diversity among its faculty and administrators. For all the ranting and raving about the importance of diversity by Sullivan and Ryan, they focused only on race, ethnicity, and gender — and totally whiffed on the most important diversity that should exist at an institution of higher learning.
Because what kind of education do you get if everyone looks different but thinks the same?
And now we have new evidence that the Ryan administration was dedicated to not only ensuring virtually no thought diversity among University employees, but also brought that same objective to the student body as well. The 2026 report issued by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the most respected organization dedicated to freedom of expression in higher education, found that the ratio of liberal to conservative students at UVA is an incredible 5.29:1. That means that for each conservative student at the University, there are more than five liberal students. By any standard, for a public university in an essentially politically even state, this is an outrageous statistic. And it becomes more outrageous still when we put it in perspective.
UVA had the 67th-highest ratio among the 257 universities and colleges included in the study. But most of the schools ranked above UVA are those small northeastern and West Coast liberal arts colleges you would expect — Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Bard, Wheaton, Haverford, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Scripps, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Occidental, etc. UVA appears much worse when measured as a state university against its peers.
Virginia schools
| School | Liberal-to-conservative ratio |
|---|---|
| VCU | 6.65:1 |
| UVA | 5.29:1 |
| William & Mary | 4.27:1 |
| George Mason | 2.42:1 |
| Virginia Tech | 1.55:1 |
| James Madison | 1.33:1 |
| Washington & Lee | 1.28:1 |
Source: FIRE, 2026 College Free Speech Rankings.
ACC schools
| School | Liberal-to-conservative ratio |
|---|---|
| Stanford | 5.33:1 |
| UVA | 5.29:1 |
| California | 5.27:1 |
| Syracuse | 4.58:1 |
| Pittsburgh | 4.46:1 |
| Georgia Tech | 3.85:1 |
| Duke | 2.87:1 |
| North Carolina | 2.55:1 |
| Louisville | 2.48:1 |
| Florida State | 1.67:1 |
| Boston College | 1.66:1 |
| Virginia Tech | 1.55:1 |
| Miami | 1.51:1 |
| SMU | 1.14:1 |
| Notre Dame | 1.10:1 |
| Wake Forest | 1.02:1 |
| NC State | 0.98:1 |
| Clemson | 0.61:1 |
Source: FIRE, 2026 College Free Speech Rankings.
Major public universities in “purple” states
| State | School | Liberal-to-conservative ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Virginia | UVA | 5.29:1 |
| Virginia Tech | 1.55:1 | |
| Michigan | Michigan | 4.88:1 |
| Michigan State | 1.50:1 | |
| Nevada | UNLV | 3.69:1 |
| Nevada (Reno) | 2.48:1 | |
| Arizona | Arizona State | 2.66:1 |
| Arizona | 1.50:1 | |
| Ohio | Ohio State | 2.56:1 |
| North Carolina | North Carolina | 2.55:1 |
| NC State | 0.98:1 | |
| Wisconsin | Wisconsin | 2.18:1 |
| Georgia | Georgia | 1.19:1 |
| Pennsylvania | Penn State | 1.19:1 |
Source: FIRE, 2026 College Free Speech Rankings.
It is obvious that UVA's ratio of liberal to conservative students is severely disproportionate to that of its peer institutions. It is the second highest of the 18 schools in the ACC, where half the conference sits under 2:1, and it is the highest of the 14 purple-state universities. In fact, the average of those 14 ratios is 2.44:1, less than half of UVAs. That UVA has such a high ratio can hardly be considered serendipity. There is little doubt it was part of Jim Ryan's ongoing effort to turn UVA into as much a social justice machine as an institution dedicated to teaching and research.
The University is choosing its next provost as I write this. Whoever it is will inherit a faculty in which conservatives are a rounding error, a student body that splits over five to one, and a set of written commitments to free expression that the last administration treated as mere decoration. The question worth putting to every candidate is not whether they believe in viewpoint diversity — they will all say yes — but given the facts as they exist, what they are prepared to do to actually bring about intellectual diversity.
Is UVA the 20th most liberal school in the country? Whether it is 20th or 25th or 15th, it is clear that Ryan succeeded in his goal of politicizing a state institution that should not be advancing a socio-political agenda. That is the role of the elected officials in the executive and legislative branches. It is now time for UVA to return to the foremost roles of a university — education and research — and to focus on recreating a level playing field for the civil, free, and unfettered exchange of ideas without fear of institutional retribution.
