THE TEXTS DON'T LIE: JERI SEIDMAN MUST RESIGN FROM THE BOARD OF VISITORS

What a FOIA request text-exchange reveals about the improper faculty manipulation of student self-governance, and the leader of the Faculty Senate’s misfeasance and hypocrisy. 

UVA's Faculty Senate has spent the better part of the last year delivering lectures on transparency, trust, and institutional integrity. Resolutions were passed. Statements were issued. The language was always lofty — accountability, shared governance, the independence of the University community.

These text messages tell a different story.

After receiving several tips about inappropriate communications between Jeri Seidman, a professor and head of the Faculty Senate, and Clay Dickerson, then-president of UVA Student Council, a FOIA request was submitted to UVA. The thread produced by the FOIA request is a series of texts stretching from July 2025 through March 2026. It is 36 pages long, detailed, and damning.

What it shows is not two University leaders exchanging ideas in good faith. It shows a faculty member methodically cultivating a student leader, scripting his public statements, directing his organization's actions, manipulating his messaging, and using him as a vehicle to move public opinion — all while the Faculty Senate was publicly and simultaneously demanding transparency from the same administration they were privately working to undermine.

Campaigns Coordinated in Secret

The texts reveal that Seidman's involvement in the anti-BOV campaign was not occasional or advisory; it was operational, sustained, and hidden.

They began on July 20th, coordinating to speak via a phone call on an unknown subject; the next day Seidman texted, “Glad you talked with NBC. I just commented as well.” A few hours later she referenced an NBC29 news segment that had just been published, calling it a “good news piece” that “made us seem all aligned.” Apparently, they “seemed” all aligned since they had coordinated efforts beforehand.

Just days later, Seidman then shared intelligence about Faculty Senate strategy with Dickerson on July 27, 2025, telling him exactly what tone the Senate would take and what grievances would resonate publicly: the speed of the presidential search, not the search committee's composition. She also pumped him for information in return: "Can you give me a summary of anything you know being planned for when students return?" and asked for a time to touch base. After an informal Faculty Senate session on July 30, Seidman went straight to Dickerson with a request: “Let’s see if we can find a mutually agreeable time for a gathering. We had our strategy session today. Happy to talk tonight or tomorrow before 3pm.”

Seidman and Dickerson texted again on August 4 trying to find a time to meet and talk.  Dickerson told Seidman, “I have an update for you” to which Seidman responded, “I will call you in 10 minutes. Sent you a draft of thoughts as well.”  Here was a senior faculty member crafting. manipulating, and exploiting a student leader by sending him a draft of her thoughts to be utilized on behalf of Student Council, supposedly an independent entity representative of student self-governance. 

The following day, August 5, Dickerson participated in a press conference with AAUP, United Campus Workers Union, and Jewish faculty. After Dickerson made his public statement, Seidman texted him with a compliment, “Nice job today, the message was high level -trust and respect.” She then followed up with this direct question: “No more no confidence vote?” since his statement lacked any mention of one.  Not surprisingly, the day after on August 6, Dickerson texted Seidman it was “official” that in two days, there would be a meeting to pass a vote of no confidence, exclaiming, “Thanks for your partnership, feeling excited for this next step.” Student Council indeed passed the no confidence vote on August 8.

The Ultimate Manipulation

After Seidman instigated and coordinated the no-confidence vote, she interposed an information distribution strategy. Seidman texted again to talk together on August 11 and then the next day asked Dickerson about a graphic.  Dickerson couldn't get his communications staff to produce one so they decided to use one Seidman created herself and gave to Dickerson. Dickerson later asked for further instructions: “Let me know when you begin distribution of the graphic and I’ll have my team get it posted and begin disbursing it.” Less than two weeks later, when Seidman wanted a flyer amplified anonymously, she incredibly told Dickerson to post it on YikYak, a platform designed so that the source cannot be identified and thus precisely to cloud transparency. “YikYak is anonymous, right? Will you post a flyer there and see if it gains traction?” Think about that. The head of the Faculty Senate manipulated a student leader to anonymously seed content she helped create in order to manufacture the appearance of organic student support and concern and to intentionally subvert the truth.

Fabricated Support

Seidman was the main coordinator of the August 26 rally—she designed the route and staging location, coordinating logistics via text in the days and hours leading up to it. 

She was, in every meaningful sense, the wirepuller and mastermind behind the gathering that was publicly presented as student expression. The Cavalier Daily reported Seidman characterized the rally as the Faculty Senate choosing "to collaborate with Student Council to show solidarity between University students, faculty and staff." That framing was a fabrication.

The night before the event, Dickerson had told her plainly: "I have no idea what the turnout will be. I didn't get a response from class councils. "The morning of, he followed up: "Couldn't get class councils on board unfortunately but I'll do my best through word of mouth." This was not solidarity. The Student Council President couldn't even get his own organization's constituent bodies to participate. What Seidman described publicly as a unified expression of student support was, in reality, a rally she formulated, organized, seeded anonymously on social media, and left to a single undergraduate to pull together on his own as her pawn.

‘’I CAN SAY WHATEVER YOU NEED ME TO…..LET ME KNOW WHATEVER I NEED TO DO AND I CAN’’

That line above — offered by Dickerson on August 25, 2025 — should give every UVA student and faculty member pause.

Here’s the context: Ahead of the community rally Seidman was planning, Dickerson offered himself as a mouthpiece, unconditionally: "Also in response to your email I can say whatever you need me to. Let me know whatever I need to do and I can."

This is the president of Student Council, the elected representative of UVA's 25,000 students. And he is telling a faculty member — now the Faculty representative member of the Board of Visitors — that she can script what he says in public. Seidman’s response was to keep going: “We can decide who says what tomorrow.” 

This Is Not What Faculty Governance Looks Like

There is a word for what happens when an adult in a position of institutional authority systematically builds a private relationship with a younger person, gains their trust, shapes their thinking, scripts their public statements, and directs their actions while encouraging them to believe they are acting of their own free will.

It is neither mentorship nor collaboration. It is manipulation (“grooming”). The power imbalance here makes it totally contemptible. Jeri Seidman is an Associate Professor at McIntire and the head of the Faculty Senate. Clay Dickerson is an undergraduate student. She has every structural advantage in that relationship, and the texts show she used it.

UVA students should be outraged that their student government – their “student self-governance” — was being manipulated as an instrument of the head of the Faculty Senate’s political agenda. Every resolution Student Council passed during this period, every statement Dickerson issued, every rally his members attended: at the time, the public believed these reflected the independent judgment of UVA students. It is now clear that they reflected a script written by Jeri Seidman.

The Transparency Hypocrisy

Seidman and her Faculty Senate colleagues have repeatedly invoked the language of transparency as a weapon against the BOV and administration. Resolution after resolution demanded openness, accountability, and honest dealing with the University community.

While those resolutions were being drafted, Seidman was actually operating a months-long, back-channel influence campaign with student leadership — one that was never disclosed, never acknowledged, and conducted secretly behind the scenes.  She was doing, in private, exactly what she accused the BOV and administration of doing. 

The hypocrisy is not incidental; it is structural. The Faculty Senate's entire moral case, led by Jeri Seidman, rested on the claim that the University leadership had violated the community's trust through secret, unilateral action. Meanwhile, Seidman was engaged in a secret manipulative action of her own, unbeknownst to the public — with a student's name on it. 

She Must Resign from the Board of Visitors

Board of Visitors members are not strategists for one faction of the University against another. They are fiduciaries, entrusted to govern UVA in the interest of all its stakeholders – including the very students whose independence Seidman spent eight months quietly eroding.

What these texts describe is fundamentally incompatible with that role. A faculty member (and now BOV representative) who secretly coordinated a student gathering, scripted student leadership's public statements, counseled anonymous social media campaigns, and used a student organization as a proxy for faculty political goals has compromised her ability to serve as an impartial steward of UVA. 

These texts represent only 36 pages of communication between Seidman and Dickerson. They do not include any of the phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings that also occurred and were referenced in the texts. We do not know the full extent of information exchanged and coordination made. Nevertheless, her behavior exhibited from the texts alone is in contravention of the “Professional Conduct and Ethics” section of the UVA Faculty Handbook by her frequent “exploitation” of a student, particularly by getting Dickerson to post something anonymously on YikYak on her behalf to further her agenda.

Jeri Seidman should resign from the Board of Visitors.

If she will not do so voluntarily, the Board should remove her. The standards she applied to University leadership – accountability, transparency, and institutional trust– apply to her as well. Seidman has failed by every measure she herself has championed. 

The students of UVA deserved an independent voice. They deserved a student government that spoke for them, not a faculty member who was cultivating their leader in private. And the University deserves a Board of Visitors free from a member who has manipulated the very community she was appointed to serve.

The texts don't lie. Jeri Seidman should resign.