One Down, Six to Go

The making of an intellectual monoculture at UVA

“Conservative students at the University of Virginia,” a fourth-year student once confided to me, “know who all the conservative professors are. … All seven of them.”

That was only a slight exaggeration. Through my work with the Jefferson Council I have identified a dozen faculty members openly identifying as conservative and/or libertarian out of roughly 1,700 faculty members. I have met three or four more not yet willing to come out of hiding.

Jim Ceaser

Whatever the precise number, it is pitifully small. And it shrank by one this month when James W. Ceaser retired from the Department of Politics, where he has taught for half a century. He ran the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy (PCD), which provided the few courses at the University where students could gain exposure to major intellectual traditions of American politics, including the thinking of the founding fathers.

Ceaser’s efforts to find a replacement to run the program with a professor sharing similar philosophical views long foundered on a reef of indifference. He has no idea if the program will survive in a form remotely resembling his vision for it. With no one passionately devoted to the program’s founding spirit, he fears, it could well be co-opted to serve other ends.

UVA has become a political monoculture. Despite their reputations as counter-culture radicals, Baby Boomer professors were an intellectually diverse lot. As Boomer faculty members retire, UVA is replacing them almost uniformly with younger scholars with a center-left orientation. The tale of the Center for Constitutionalism and Democracy is a case study in what that process looked like and how, despite the protestations of President Jim Ryan that he is committed to intellectual diversity, conservatives are approaching extinction at UVA.

The problem isn’t that conservative professors get purged or canceled, says Ceaser, it’s that departments dominated by leftist professors don’t give attention to conservative ideas and research, and they are not inclined to hire or promote those who are. The indifference runs through the academic hierarchy from deans and department heads to the provost and president.

“The lack of interest is endemic,” Ceaser says. “No one is pushing for intellectual balance.”

Ceaser launched the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy two decades ago. The inspiration was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s 1818 “Rockfish Gap Report,” which advocated a curriculum to foster an “enlightened body of citizens for a liberal democracy” that came to be embodied in the University of Virginia.

Few professors at UVA’s political science department have an interest in political theory, much the less foundational theory of the 18th and 19th centuries, Ceaser observes. UVA political scientists today are data-oriented and focused on modern political structures. PCD fills the void. Its flagship courses include the American Political Tradition and American Political Economy. Students are exposed to thinkers ranging from John Locke and Adam Smith to Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and, later in American history, Abraham Lincoln.

Were it not for the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy, Ceaser says, “these courses would not be taught.”

PCD classes are small, allowing ample opportunity to discuss and explore ideas. Well over 1,000 students have enrolled in the American Political Tradition class since it was introduced, and hundreds in a more recent course, American Political Economy. The PCD also brings in guest lecturers, runs undergraduate reading groups, helps postgraduate students find academic placements, and has taught courses in the American political tradition to Virginia teachers in summer courses.

Despite filling a vital niche in UVA’s curriculum, the PCD receives no direct financial support from the University. It survives because Ceaser raised money independently from foundations and private donors, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jack Miller Center, philanthropist John Lillard, and other sources.

Most recently, the Nau Foundation (funded by John Nau, who is serving his second term on the Board of Visitors) provided $3.5 million to the program as part of a larger $27.5 million gift. The purpose of Nau’s 2020 contribution, according to a Declaration of Intent signed by then-Provost Elizabeth Magill and then-dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Ian Baucom, was to promote “open inquiry and a diversity of ideas in higher education.”

At the time, the university lauded Nau for his contribution and praised the program. Even so, Ceaser’s effort spanning two or more years to ensure that program’s founding vision would persist beyond his retirement came to naught. Only in the past month — in a very different political climate — has he received hints that attitudes may be changing. He is hopeful but doesn’t know how seriously to take them.

In 2022 Ceaser recruited Rita Koganzon, as a “post doc” faculty member in PCD. She was a promising young PhD whose research interests were exceptionally timely given the increasing intrusion of politics and ideology — abortion, birth control and transgender rights, to name a few instances — into American childhood. Her research examined the relationship between children, parents and the state in the early modern era. In her profile page she writes:

Rita Koganzon

Children are born incapable of full citizenship, and so require both a justification for their subordination to adults and an education that will prepare them for citizenship. These requirements are especially difficult for liberal democracies, for whom the exercise of authority is fundamentally at odds with the natural liberty and equality of citizens on which the state is grounded. My work aims to recover the ways that earlier writers have addressed the problem of childhood in political thought, education, literature, and the law.

Koganzon had an impeccable academic pedigree, having received her graduate education studying under Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, one of the most respected political theorists in the country. Moreover, she had published a distinguished book, “Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought.”

“She had excellent qualifications,” Ceaser says.

As Ceaser planned his impending retirement, Koganzon seemed a logical successor for consideration as his replacement. She had been teaching and running the program for six years, and she had an exceptionally strong scholarly and teaching record. Creating a sense of urgency, she’d received job offers from other universities that would put her on the coveted tenure track. Ceaser began pushing the political science department to grant her tenure-track status as an inducement to stay.

Ceaser wrote a letter of recommendation to the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Ian Baucom (who subsequently became provost). He kicked it up to President Ryan, who passed it down to Liz Magill, who was provost at the time but had just accepted a job as president of the University of Pennsylvania. “She was very nice,” Ceaser says, “but she was halfway out the door.”

Ultimately, the decision was left up to the Department of Politics. Koganzon, who had another job offer in hand, needed a decision quickly. Department Chair Jennifer Lawless circulated her curricula vitae to other faculty members. People were leaving for winter break, so there were no meetings or interviews. A couple of faculty members wanted to grant her request but most did not.

With no assurance that UVA would renew her short-term contract, much less appoint her to succeed Ceaser, Kaganzon took a tenure-track job with the University of Houston. She has since moved to the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

When Bacon’s Rebellion talked to Koganzon two years ago, she said she didn’t sense any hostility to her or her conservative ideas. Just indifference. She wasn’t what UVA’s other political scientists were looking for.

Lawless declined to respond to a Bacon’s Rebellion request for an interview.

Ironically, while the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy has languished at UVA, the movement to promote civic education has taken off around the country. Ceaser cites a half-dozen prominent state universities — the University of Florida and the University of Carolina-Chapel Hill, as well as institutions in Tennessee, Utah, Ohio, and Texas — that have established schools and centers where the thinking of the American founders is celebrated. In fact, most have been staffed or even led by alumni of the UVA program like Koganzon and her PCD successor Danielle Charette, who also moved to Chapel Hill.

Jim Ryan has repeatedly said that he supports “all kinds” of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. He commissioned a special committee to draft a formal statement on free speech and free expression. And then he backed a March 2023 Board of Visitors resolution that not only reiterated UVA’s commitment to free speech but singled out the importance of intellectual diversity. States the resolution:

We value a scholarly environment that is supported by a diversity of research and intellectual perspectives among our faculty and staff. We pledge to promote and uphold inclusivity, academic freedom, free expression, and an environment that promotes civil discourse across differences. 

Provost Baucom addressed Board questions about what UVA was doing to carry through on its commitment to intellectual diversity. To counter the observation that UVA employee contributions to political candidates favors Democrats over Republicans by a ratio or 20 to one, he assured the Board that university search committees “cannot inquire” about a candidate’s partisan affiliations. Indeed, as provost, he said, he has never asked a job applicant his or her political loyalties.

Furthermore, he said, UVA teaches “large histories of thought” and employs a “global framework for understanding the world.” It is possible to build diversity of thought into a course, he added, by requiring students to “argue for or against” an issue.

I can confirm from personal conversations and correspondence that some UVA professors do encourage students to express diverse views in the classroom. But fostering debate is not the same as offering students classes in which they can read deeply in conservative, libertarian and classical liberal thought and, thereby, advance their thinking.

There is much more that Baucom could have told the Board but declined to mention. At that time, UVA required “DEI statements” from job applicants and in job reviews detailing an individual’s commitment to advancing DEI principles in research, in the classroom, and in the community.

Nor did Baucom note that while the University has accepted Nau’s gifts for endowed faculty positions with an eye to promoting intellectual diversity, the administration itself has pursued grants and gifts for overtly left-of-center initiatives such as the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, headed by former Obama adviser Melody Barnes, and the “Race, Place & Equity” initiative to support 10 new faculty members notable mainly for their anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-establishment scholarship.

Nor did the provost mention the every-day hiring process in which departments, dominated by center-left professors, overwhelmingly hire new professors who think like them. As conservatives age out, they are replaced with young faculty members whose views, research interests and social-justice priorities they find congenial. The bias suffuses the academic hierarchy at every stage: from recruiting graduate students, to inviting faculty into the tenure track, to granting tenure.

When Ryan had an opportunity to do something tangible to increase intellectual diversity in the faculty by promoting an eminently qualified Rita Koganzon, he kicked the decision down to Baucom.

When Baucom had an opportunity to increase the diversity of viewpoints, he passed the buck to the Department of Politics department head Jennifer Lawless.

When the Politics faculty had an opportunity to increase intellectual diversity, it just wasn’t a priority.

No one but Jim Ceaser went to bat for Koganzon. Not only did she not get a tenure-track job, she never got a hearing.

That’s how it works in department after department until, in many cases, there are no conservatives left to advocate for different viewpoints.

Now that Jim Ceaser is gone, what happens to the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy is anyone’s guess.

A year ago, Ceaser feared that his program might be absorbed by the academic bureaucracy and remade in its politically “progressive” image. But the changing national conversation in higher education and a newly assertive Board of Visitors at UVA might be nudging the administration into thinking differently.

Ryan sent Ceaser a quick note a couple of weeks ago — the first time the university president had ever initiated contact with him. There wasn’t much to the email, Ceaser recollects, but Ryan did seem positive about keeping PCD going.

Ceaser also had an upbeat conversation with Christa Acampora, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. She expressed interest in the future of the program and hinted that it could be expanded to other departments. Her thoughts were very preliminary, Ceaser cautions, but she indicated she wanted to keep the program going in the same spirit he had founded it. “It was definitely positive.”