UVA’s Board Stacking the Deck for Another Year
When the University of Virginia Board of Visitors convened last week, thirteen-of-seventeen voting board members were selected by Governor Glenn Youngkin, marking the first time in his two-and-a-half-year tenure that his appointees comprised a majority. But to all outward appearances, it was business as usual in Charlottesville. None of the issues raised by critics, including some board members, appeared on the two-day docket.
As always, the tightly scripted Board meeting addressed only issues that the Ryan administration wanted to address and left no time for Board members to ask probing questions.
Every year, President Jim Ryan updates his list of priorities. He did so again Friday, and they are essentially unchanged: recruit and retain top-flight faculty, improve the student experience, bring in more sponsored research, engage with stakeholders, promote free speech. The main new wrinkle this year is to build on the work of the Religious Diversity Task Force.
There’s nothing wrong with that list, but it’s incomplete. Here are priorities that don’t make the cut: chop administrative overhead; lower tuition and fees; roll back the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy; reverse the relentless drift toward intellectual monoculture; promote transparency in finances and decision making.
As Ryan recommitted himself to doing business as usual at UVA, the Board buttressed the status quo.
UVA governance, as at all of Virginia’s public universities, is designed to maintain stability and continuity over change. Under the Commonwealth’s system of governance, UVA’s rector (equivalent to board chairman) is Robert Hardie, an appointee of former Governor Ralph Northam. The vice rector is Carlos Brown, also a Northam holdover. Hardie, Ryan, and Board secretary Susan Harris collaborate on setting the Board agenda, lining up presentations, and selecting the information the Board will hear.
Unless dissident Board members orchestrate an overthrow — which is theoretically possible but almost impossible under the governing rules — individuals supporting Northam-era policies will continue to run the board for another year.
In a little-noted action, the Board also voted Friday to appoint a status-quo slate to the Board’s Executive Committee. The vote was buried in what’s called the “consent agenda,” a series of rushed votes on routine matters, which last week ran the gamut from recognizing the contributions of recently deceased alumni to addressing US Department of Defense security clearances for Board members.
There appears this three-line item in the printed consent agenda (Section C in this twenty-seven-page document, one of about eight such documents).
RESOLVED: in addition to the Rector and the Vice Rector, Robert M. Blue, Paul B. Manning, John L. Nau III, Amanda L. Pillion, and Rachel W. Sheridan are elected to the Executive Committee for the 2024-2025 year.
The vote took twenty-four seconds. There was no discussion. Review the tape above.
Thirteen-of-seventeen voting board members are Youngkin appointees, but only four-of-seven members of the Executive Committee are. As noted above, Hardie and Brown are Northam holdovers. So is Robert M. Blue, the chairman and CEO of Dominion Energy.
Paul Manning and John Nau are interesting cases. Both men are Youngkin appointees. Both made large contributions to the Youngkin campaign, and both are major donors to UVA. But both are deeply enmeshed with the Ryan administration.
Manning, a serial entrepreneur living outside Charlottesville, donated $100 million to kickstart the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology to develop, commercialize, and manufacture cellular, gene, and immunotherapies. The Institute cannot move forward without the dedicated commitment of the Ryan administration: obtaining financial support from the Commonwealth, recruiting world-class faculty, designing and building the state-of-the-art facility in the Fontaine Research Park, tweaking intellectual property policies, building institutional ties with the medical school and health system, and the like. Manning did not just stroke a check and lend his name. He is deeply involved with getting the Institute up and running. He has developed personal relationships with Ryan and other senior UVA executives. Although he may be philosophically conservative, his commitment to the Institute likely outweighs most other considerations.
Nau, CEO of Texas beer distributor Silver Eagle Beverages, also has donated generously to UVA. He most visibly created endowed professorships at the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA and the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, run by one of UVA’s few conservative professors Jim Ceaser. Nau also serves on the advisory board of the Karsh Institute for Democracy. As chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee, he played a key behind-the-scenes role in the controversy over renaming Alderman Library to Shannon Library. Board member Bert Ellis had succeeded briefly in blocking the memory-holing of one of UVA’s most transformative presidents, but Nau was instrumental in engineering a Board vote to push through the renaming. He, too, must be regarded as a status quo figure.
Amanda Pillion and Rachel Sheridan are the remaining figures. Pillion, a Youngkin appointee and wife of Virginia Senator Todd Pillion, is a quiet member of the Board. Her few remarks tend to focus on affordability and access for students from southwest Virginia. She is an unlikely candidate to shake up the power structure.
Sheridan, a northern Virginia attorney who focuses on capital market transactions, counts governance as one of her areas of legal expertise. She has worked constructively behind the scenes to make technical tweaks to UVA’s governance system, but she has never asked questions during open Board meetings that might challenge the administration’s practices.
None of the figures who have asked probing questions of the Ryan administration — Bert Ellis, Doug Wetmore, Paul Harris, and Stephen Long — serve on the Executive Committee.
Why does that matter? What does the Executive Committee even do?
According to the Board of Visitors website, the Executive Committee meets when called upon by the Rector. Between Board meetings, the Committee is “vested with the power and authority of the full Board and shall take such action on all matters that may be referred to it as its judgment is required.” Committee actions require a two-thirds vote and must be reported to the full Board.
One key role is to oversee governance guidelines for the Board of Visitors. But the Committee’s writ extends beyond the Board itself [my bold].
As part of its responsibilities, the Executive Committee shall work with the President to encourage and support an atmosphere at the University that ensures that diverse members of the University of Virginia and Charlottesville communities are treated equally and fairly. This is essential to creating an educational experience for students to prepare them for productive and responsible citizenship in the world beyond the University community. This responsibility includes encouraging and supporting the attraction and retention of a diverse group of students, faculty, and staff. “Diverse” includes race and ethnicity, age, gender, disability status, sexual orientation, religion and national origin, socio-economic status, and other aspects of individual experience and identity.
On behalf of the Board, the Executive Committee shall be responsible for working with the University administration on communication strategies and messaging with respect to emerging and urgent issues including informing and educating policy makers and regulatory oversight organizations and bodies.
The rules of the Committee explicitly require it to advance the cause of “diversity” among students, faculty, and staff. The question is whose definition of diversity applies. Presumably, that of the Ryan administration.
The existence of the Executive Committee is important in another way. State law limits the ability of Board members to communicate with one another to work toward a common goal. They can talk one-on-one, but any gathering (in person, by phone, or by Zoom call) of three or more constitutes a meeting of the Board and triggers the open-meeting requirements of the state code. It is exceedingly difficult for a dissenting group to organize in pursuit of a competing agenda.
By contrast, Rector Hardie can call his seven-person Executive Committee at any time to discuss “emerging and urgent issues,” coordinate the response of seven of the board’s seventeen members, and indeed occasionally make decisions for the full Board.
That’s just one of many ways the deck is stacked, the ghost of former Governor Ralph Northam still runs the Board of Visitors, and the status quo is upheld.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
