A Whisper of Fresh Air
University of Virginia Dean Christa Acampora
In December, the University of Virginia College of Arts and Sciences emailed faculty members with a new form to use in their annual assessments. Much to the wonder of a correspondent who conveyed the details to me, missing were the usual boxes requiring expositions of professors’ contributions to diversity in teaching, research, advising and so forth.
To be sure, a diversity question has survived any winnowing of wokeness in the Student Experience of Teaching Evaluations, in which students evaluate their courses and professors. Students are still asked if they agree or disagree with the statement, “The instructor created an environment that respected difference and welcomed diverse perspectives.”
Still, our interlocutor expresses delight: “Someone has smelled the coffee, and it [the diversity-state requirement] is all completely gone!”
Many universities are scrapping their diversity statements. Critics have condemned the requirements as a form of compelled speech — an ideological litmus test of sorts. The University of Michigan Board of Regents, for instance, voted recently to drop diversity statements in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. So have several other universities.
The UVA Board of Visitors has made no such decision. Despite the national backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) forcing many universities to re-evaluate their policies, the UVA Board has yet to broach the subject of diversity statements. Neither has President Jim Ryan issued any pronouncement hinting at a rethinking of the requirement. The College of Arts and Sciences decision that delighted my correspondent was implemented with no fanfare at all.
I asked Dean Christa Acampora for an interview to explain the thinking behind the decision, and I received this answer from Chief of Staff Kerry Searle Grannis: “Thank you for the query. Dean Acampora is traveling. I am responding on her behalf. The faculty annual reporting system was replaced this year; the new system included multiple changes to the submission form to better align with departmental review processes. We appreciate the interest but Dean Acampora is not available for an interview.”
I can understand how this must be a touchy subject for the dean. I also get it that granting an interview on the topic to a member of The Jefferson Council (I’m Contributing Editor) would be seen by many leftist faculty members, some of whom regard the Jefferson Council as a racist, sexist, homophobic organization, as consorting with the enemy. I’d like to think that her rejection of my interview request was motivated by a desire to avoid disruptive blowback from faculty members, although it might have been nixed by the UVA communications team, which has declined to answer repeated requests I’ve made to talk to members of the administration.
Some of my colleagues at The Jefferson Council regard Acampora with suspicion: as just another UVA apparatchik who follows the “progressive” party line established by President Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom. Her bio would seem to support such a view.
Acampora, a native of Roanoke and Dublin, Va., was recruited to UVA in 2022 to serve as the dean of Arts & Sciences. She came from Emory University in Atlanta where she had been deputy provost and a professor of philosophy. In an interview with UVA Today at the time, she listed among the great challenges facing liberal arts education “demands for the realization of social justice” and “the inevitability of global climate change.”
To be sure, that’s standard “progressive” fare. Indeed, it’s the kind of verbiage one might be expected to express in a diversity statement. I have no doubt that Acampora holds such sentiments sincerely. But I suspect that she is cut from a different cloth than the typical college dean.
Dispensing with the diversity statements was a bold step. She risked courting controversy even though there was no visible outside pressure for her to do so.
The first time Acampora came to my attention was at the September 2023 Board of Visitors meeting. She didn’t sound like a political progressive at all but rather, as she described herself to the board, “a bottom-line, up-front kind of person.”
The subject was student advising — and the need for more of it. UVA provides advising and counseling services to students for academics and career guidance, but senior administrators thought they need more — more advisers meeting students with greater frequency and addressing a wider variety of concerns. They pitched advising in a “systematic, holistic way” that includes extracurricular activities, “personal wellbeing” and “caring for your whole self.”
The first three administrators offered a lot of happy talk. Then Acampora addressed the Board. The way the College of Arts and Sciences was conducting advising, she said, was “not acceptable.”
Pre-major (or academic) advising was not working for either the faculty or the students, she declared. Students were happy with their academic experience but not with their advising. The problem was not an insufficient number of advisors, she said. UVA had a lot of dedicated advisers already. But they worked in silos.
At the time of her presentation, Acampora said the College was three months into an engagement with consultants. Her goal was to achieve “a sustainable resource model that is worthy of investment.”
She has never been invited back to the Board to give an update. It wasn’t clear what she meant by a “sustainable resource model” or how much of an “investment” she was thinking about. But the impression I got was that she wanted to make better use of the resources available to her.
If that impression was accurate, the concern with efficiency was not a one-off. I have been told by a knowledgeable source (who of course asked to remain anonymous) that Acampora wanted more money to bolster compensation for UVA’s notoriously underpaid graduate students, who provide critical research and teaching support for the faculty. Instead of begging higher-ups for a bigger College budget, as I heard the story, she trimmed employment and spending for departments with low enrollments to free up funds for the grad students.
I asked last year to interview Acampora about that restructuring, which I found to be a refreshing alternative to passing on the cost to students in the form of higher tuition. I never received a response. I get it. Granting an interview might open her to accusations of dancing with the devil.
At the risk of triggering those who loathe The Jefferson Council and making her life more difficult, however, I would suggest Acampora is someone to watch. She appears to have done two things we believe in. She has struck a blow (albeit a quiet one) for free speech by eliminating the diversity statements, and she has taken a do-more-with-less approach toward student advising and grad student pay.
Any conclusions I have drawn here are tentative, given that she has been unwilling to share her thinking, so I have been left to surmise her intentions. Perhaps the Board of Visitors should invite her back for a free-wheeling discussion. She might have other ideas worth sharing.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
