The Provost Search Is On
Now comes the battle to replace the University of VIrginia’s provost Ian Baucom. The University has assembled a fourteen-person group to launch a national search, according to an announcement in the UVA house organ UVA Today.
The announcement attributed the appointments vaguely to “the University of Virginia,” without identifying specifically who made the selection. An educated guess is that President Jim Ryan picked the members of the search committee, perhaps in consultation with Rector Robert Hardie, his close ally on the Board of Visitors. But that is only an inference.
The announcement gave no clue what criteria “the university” would use in seeking a successor. Baucom was Ryan’s right-hand man who executed his “great and good” agenda to transform UVA in line with social-justice and equity principles. It would surprise no one if Ryan wanted a chief academic officer who would sustain that legacy.
The selection of the second most powerful administrator at UVA could be contentious, however. It is not in the least melodramatic to suggest that the future of UVA’ hangs in the balance.
Through most of his tenure at UVA, the Board of Visitors gave Ryan carte blanche to pick and choose his senior management team. It has been only in the past half year — since board members appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin attained a majority on the board — that anyone has given Ryan serious pushback. Most disagreements have played out behind the scenes, not in the boardroom where it would be visible to the public. With Ryan’s last pre-Youngkin loyalists scheduled to rotate off, the board is sure to take a more assertive role in approving Baucom’s successor.
Ryan made sweeping changes to UVA’s top brass when he took over as president in 2018. He ousted Chief Operating Officer Pat Hogan, UVA’s No. 3, and replaced him with J.J. Davis. He eased out Allan Stam as dean of the Batten School of Leadership and replaced him with loyalist Ian Solomon. He pushed out Dean of Student Affairs Allen W. Groves in 2021, a beloved figure on campus, and replaced him with Robyn S. Hadley (who would resign suddenly in 2023 for unexplained reasons).
Ryan’s pick for provost in 2019 was Liz Magill. She was known as a forceful advocate of “progressive” priorities. Thanks in large measure to her high-profile position as UVA provost, she was snapped up three years later by the University of Pennsylvania to serve as president. She gained brief national notoriety as one of three female university presidents who testified before Congress during the furor over pro-Palestinian demonstrations. She gave a narrow, legalistic answer to the question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct. Pilloried in the media, Magill was subsequently fired from the job.
The same day in January 2022 that UVA Today announced Magill’s departure for Penn, the administration’s house organ noted that Ryan had tapped Baucom, who then was serving as the dean of UVA’s College of Arts and Sciences, to take her place. There was no national search. Ryan installed Baucom directly. In that position Baucom diligently carried out the recommendations of the Racial Equity Task Force, adopted as formal policy by the Board of Visitors, to implement sweeping change at UVA. Under Magill and Baucom, the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy expanded to one of the largest of any public university in the country and new faculty hirings accelerated the university’s drift toward left-wing orthodoxy.
Clearly, Ryan is no longer in a position politically to hand-pick the selection of the new provost.
The search will be chaired by Malo Hutson, dean of the School of Architecture. Hutson is known as one of the most aggressively leftist deans at UVA, an institution where a commitment to leftist causes is a mandatory job criterion. His personal web page describes Hutson as an “internationally recognized expert” in community development, climate resilience, environmental justice, and urban health. “As a scholar, teacher, and practitioner, he focuses on the nexus of environmental, architectural, and urban equity practices.”
That is the man who will steer the search. The other thirteen members represent a cross-section of the university. Encouragingly, two Youngkin-appointed members — Amanda Pullion and Porter Wilkinson — will serve on the committee, as will Ken Elzinga, a revered economics professor and one of the handful of faculty members willing to openly identify as a conservative.
There are too many unknowns to forecast how this will all turn out. Only one thing can be said with certainty: Any new provost will have to win the approval of the Board of Visitors, and the board will not bless anyone who supports business as usual.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
