UVA once was fully aware of its intended purpose. As it writes its next strategic plan, it has to decide whether it wants to remember.
Near the end of the classic film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, our hero and the villain who have been searching for the Holy Grail find themselves in a room full of many cups. One of them is the Holy Grail – drinking from any of the others will kill you.
The villain goes first. He grabs the most dazzling one, all gold and jewels, the cup a king would drink from. He drinks, and he crumbles to dust in seconds. Then it’s Indy’s turn. He doesn’t reach for the shiniest thing on the table. He reaches for the plainest: a simple clay cup, the kind a carpenter from Nazareth would actually have used. He knows this because he’s a scholar. He studied history, and he was raised by a father who spent his whole life studying it. He drinks, and he lives.
“You have chosen… wisely,” the old knight tells him.
The lesson isn’t subtle. Knowledge and humility trumps avarice and power.
UVA once had a plain cup of its own. It was an institution dedicated to the essential elements of a university founded by Thomas Jefferson – educating its students in a climate of differing opinions in preparation for a real world where such diversity of thought exists, and supporting research that would enhance its educational mission. It did not envision itself as a public establishment to advocate for and bolster political and social agendas.
The Plain Cup
In 1974, UVA’s Board of Visitors adopted a Statement of Purpose. Its first sentence said what a university is and should be: “a community of scholars having as its central purpose the enrichment of the human mind by stimulating and sustaining a spirit of free inquiry.”
That was it. That was the point. In 1985, the Board said it again: “The central purpose of the University of Virginia is to enrich the mind.” It made liberal education “the central intellectual concern of the University.” It asked students to apply “the most rigorous criticism to all ideas and institutions, whether old or new.”
The 1985 statement wasn’t narrow. It had 14 goals, including diversity, access for students without money, health care and public service. But every one of them answered back to that first sentence. Public service in particular came with a leash: it had to be “consonant with” the University’s purpose to enrich the mind..
This was UVA’s plain cup, the unadorned pursuit of truth, as per Mr. Jefferson’s oft-quoted dictum: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
The Jeweled Cup
In 2019, newly installed president Jim Ryan boldly rewrote the University’s mandate with his “Great and Good” strategic plan. Ryan’s 2030 Strategic Plan essentially put social responsibility and community service on the same level as education and research. Thus, under the 2030 plan, UVA committed itself to fighting social mobility gaps, educational inequities and health disparities, and to making the Charlottesville region one of the most equitable places to live. Its own progress report brags about a plan for 1,500 affordable housing units, a center for health equity, and a presidential council on community partnerships.
While some may politically support Ryan’s social responsibility efforts, it is clear that housing policy, public health and regional equity are what we elect government officials to do. In essence, Jim Ryan attempted to turn UVA into a branch of the Commonwealth’s public governmental structure.
And Ryan’s expansion of the University’s mission unfortunately came with concomitant deleterious costs. The financial costs connected with the politicization of the University’s mission have been material. Tuition and housing continue to soar. Buildings continue to sprawl. UVA’s expansive DEI infrastructure, one of the most expensive in the country, dwarfed many academic departments. And while DEI at UVA was officially ended, the DEI infrastructure remains essentially intact under the new “Division for Community Engagement and Equal Opportunity.” Is UVA really an educational institution when its so-called community social responsibilities cost $8.57M in salaries, exceeding budgets for many of the academic departments in the College? . And how are our students’ minds being enriched when the VP for Community Engagement earns nearly 3X as much as the average UVA professor and more than almost every professor in the College?
Moreover, Ryan’s “jeweled cup” came with another price: the faculty and administration stopped looking like a place of free inquiry.
When Jim Ryan took office in 2018–19, a quarter of UVA’s deans were conservative. Within 2 years the number was zero, where it remains. A university whose foremost stated purpose is “developing responsible citizen leaders and professionals” ends up with a leadership in an echo chamber that agrees with itself. Moreover the same can be said for the faculty, where it appears that there are probably no more than 3% of the faculty that are right of center.
The concept of thought diversity among UVA’s faculty and administration is about as realistic as thought diversity in Vladimir Putin’s administration.
And without thought diversity not only does true freedom of expression become a non-starter, the ability to enrich the student minds with various viewpoints becomes minimal at best.
A Time for Choosing
So here are the questions:
Do we want a University that puts community service on par with education, and spends its resources on housing, public health and regional planning, turning itself into an arm of government? One that pays administrators far more than the professors who teach? One that lacks diversity of thought among the people who lead it and educate its students? Is this where we want to be?
UVA is about to write its next strategic plan. That makes this a time for choosing. The Board can reach for the gold and jewels again: more political and social agendas, more centers, more offices, more administrators. Or it can do what Indiana Jones did, and choose the “plain” cup. The scholar’s cup. The one that says what a University is actually for – critical education and research.
It’s still there, in the Board’s own minutes from 1985: “The central purpose of the University of Virginia is to enrich the mind.”
Choose wisely.