The Sordid Reality of “Great and Good”
The University of Virginia’s 2030 Plan for creating “a great and good university” lists ten key initiatives, one of which is its “good neighbor program.” The description reads in its entirety:
In partnership with our neighbors in Charlottesville and surrounding counties, we will work toward being a just and sustainable community. We will work collaboratively, and with all due humility, with our community partners to address key challenges, including housing, living wages, local educational opportunities, and access to health care. We will set ambitious sustainability goals and develop a realistic plan to meet them, including an improved transportation system. We will launch the Center for the Redress of Inequity, which will support community-engaged scholarship to model how public research universities can help reduce racial and socioeconomic inequities in our local communities. To make it easier for our neighbors to interact with the University, we will create a community engagement office in an easily accessible location in town.
Charlottesville city leaders would settle for $10 million a year in lieu of property taxes.
Elected officials in the People’s Republic of Charlottesville generally share the same social-justice aspirations as the administrators running UVA. They’re just as woke, just as focused on equity and sustainability. But they’d rather have the cash so they can pursue those goals themselves.
In the city, UVA owns 97 parcels of land encompassing 200 acres. If it weren’t tax exempt, writes The Daily Progress, UVA would be paying $20 million in taxes. That’s a lot of money for a city with a $250 million budget.
UVA’s medical and academic divisions comprise a $5 billion-a-year enterprise, city officials argue. Ten million dollars is a drop in the bucket for the institution. Why not contribute Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT), which many other universities do, for the full $20 million?
UVA counters that it does provide some services such as police, transit, and public works that normally fall to local government, and it is working to address the affordable-housing crisis by building more student housing. Still, a large disparity exists, and according to The Daily Progress, UVA has “shown little interest” in addressing it.
“Even just $10 million a year, about half of what UVa’s tax liability might be, even that would be enough to fully pay for all public-school facility upgrades over the next decade,” City Councilor Michael Payne told The Daily Progress. “It would cover the entirety of our affordable housing commitment in our affordable housing strategy. It would have a very substantial impact in terms of what the city can afford to do.”
“I think the big question is if the benefits UVa provides are trickling down to everybody in the community or if it is contributing to economic inequality in the city,” Payne said.
UVA as a cause of economic inequality? Ouch.
It would be interesting to know how much UVA is spending on its “great and good” community engagement programs. Perhaps the Board of Visitors could ask for that information. The “good neighbor” initiative is, after all, a “strategic” priority, so the Board could not be accused of meddling in things that don’t concern it.
One thing you can count on the “great and good” initiatives doing effectively: providing employment for UVA professors, post docs, and graduate students. Likewise, you can be assured that the programs export the social-justice ideology of intersectional oppression (or wokeness) into the community. But do the programs do anything useful for the citizens of Charlottesville?
Does UVA ameliorate economic inequality or make it worse?
In fairness, one also might inquire whether the city government of Charlottesville, given its history of dysfunctional leadership, would put an extra $10 million to any better use than UVA. Perhaps not. But local governments have elections. If dissatisfied with their leaders, citizens can vote them out of office.
UVA leadership doesn’t have elections. Unhappy constituents cannot vote UVA leaders out of office.
Here’s the reality: UVA, like most higher-ed institutions, is run by an oligarchy of highly paid administrators and tenured faculty who strive to enhance institutional prestige (and thereby their own prestige in the wider academic world) and preserve their privileges and emoluments within a highly stratified organization. The ideology of intersectional oppression, which divides the academic proletariat along lines of race, gender, and sexuality, functions to divert criticism from the inequitable class structure of which academic elites are the beneficiaries.
UVA leaders are not accountable to anyone — not to alumni, not to students, not to voters, certainly not to the elected officials of Charlottesville, and not even to the Board of Visitors. That is the sordid backdrop to “great and good.”
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
