Virginia Higher Education
What not to do about goverance
Here’s the thing to sort out about Virginia’s colleges and universities: These schools achieved widespread acclaim on the basis of a rather specific, long-standing governing arrangement. Today most everyone looks upon Virginia higher education with pride and satisfaction. It works for us; it has for a long time.
So why have so many people, serving in state government, in both political parties, labored so hard to undermine it? That’s what we need to understand and, if possible, avoid further damage to a justly celebrated collection of state schools.
Let’s start with the good news: Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger’s leadership potential is impossible to miss. She’s easy on her feet, laughs quickly and seems naturally adept at the political arts and sciences. She will enter the Virginia governor’s office on a wave of good will and with a clear opportunity to get things done.
Just last week, for instance, she gave confidence-inspiring public reassurances that she will not support legislation to force people to join unions. Good. The business community has enough on its hands with Democrats controlling all of state government and the next surge – starting just next month -- of fix-the-world progressive legislation.
Spanberger says she will be a moderate, pragmatically-minded governor and that will be no snap to achieve. Her leadership will be challenged by members of her own party. Do this, do that, do it all, they will say.
One thing not to do: A quick and furious overhaul of higher education governance in Virginia.
On this subject, Spanberger could advantageously slow down and take a breath – “respire,” as the French say – and consult with as many people as possible, with as diverse a range of perspectives as possible, and then gradually work up to her choices.
Less could prove more meritorious than more. The existing system works, if everyone will simply let it.
But in the era of Trump, the stress fractures in Virginia higher education are growing all over the place. “We will not allow intimidation of our college administrators or the silencing of our students by-right wing ideologues who want to use our universities as a social experiment,” declares Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth.
Right. Note, however, that Lucas did not rule out intimidation of college administrators or the silencing of students by left-wing ideologues. Lucas simply doesn’t think outside of the political box nor does she ever venture from her end of the box.
She’s valiant in that respect, a true single-minded warrior on behalf of what she believes. Don’t take what I’m saying as a lack of admiration for a political career begun more than three decades ago. Lucas is a formidable figure and never more so since achieving the Senate Finance Committee chair.
But obduracy on the subject of Virginia higher education – a dogged ideological preference and damn the torpedoes – is probably the least useful political stance to take right now. We need more wisdom out of the General Assembly and we’re not getting anything like that.
It comes down to who’s going to run the colleges and universities and lately its turned Shakespearean. The situation at the University of Virginia rivals Elsinore Castle for the level of intrigue and the hour-by-hour machinations. Any day now, they’re going to cordon off the entire campus with yellow tape and label it a crime scene.
How bad is it?
“What’s raising my blood pressure right now is the blind insistence by everyone involved at UVA that we keep rehashing the past. They are all using recriminations, innuendo, rumor, and blatant partisanship,” said an old friend and veteran of many boards.
I called my chum because he knows the immediate participants and understands the consequences of what’s happening.
“This is getting us nowhere; and it’s beginning to piss me off. Is there not a single leader, editorial writer, commentator, or student activist who has the vision to write about the few simple things that could be done to fix all this, and get the Commonwealth’s flagship university back on the rails by installing a great new president.”
He was only warming up.
“The deficient 12 member board and the nation’s preeminent hi-ed executive search firm are plowing ahead with a national search. Right now they are turning institutions across America into rumor mills and creating nationwide uncertainty, while they continue culling candidates. They risk muddying the waters for several years to come. Someone must speak up NOW and point out that it will soon be too late to assure that UVA has good leadership through 2032 and beyond. The only way to avoid replicating the recently failed search for a provost is to get some credible, non-partisan external leaders involved on the search committee immediately. This could easily be done if everyone got out of combat mode and into governance mode.”
That doesn’t sound like an argument for Richmond intervention. Virginia has had all the intervention from that direction it can stand.
And it’s certainly not an argument for intervention by a new governor, who may not fully appreciate the risks of further aggravating an already aggravated situation.
Spanberger insists, for instance, that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s approach to appointing and influencing university governing boards destabilized the institutions. She told The Washington Post that “it can’t be overstated the type of upheaval and the type of overstepping that frankly board members have seen, which is an aberration.”
O.K., I can think of things (his early and successful efforts to determine the chancellor of the community college system, for one) that Youngkin could have avoided.
But Youngkin’s worst moments on higher ed pale against the Democrats attack on Virginia Military Institute five years ago. Now there was an aberration -- a flagrant foul, deliberate and engineered by Democrats in response to Trump and the culture wars the president manically fans.
That stunt upended VMI and drove off its superintendent, Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, a Virginia native, former vice chief-of-staff of the U.S. Army and head of Central Command.
Let me get this across as clearly as I can. No Virginia-born officer of the last half‑century surpasses Peay’s record in combined operational command, four‑star level responsibility, and subsequent institutional leadership. Peay stands at or very near the top of all Virginia‑born U.S. general officers ever in terms of both professional stature and long-term influence.
That’s who Gov. Ralph Northam and his Democratic Party lawmakers decided had to go.
Then they literally went out and hired an out-of-state law firm that matched up with their ideas about coercive racial equity. Compulsion muscled aside consent and, ka-boom, as promised, the law firm delivered 42 diversity, equity and inclusion recommendations for VMI, all in pursuit of reining in a conservative, Republican-leading state college.
Of course, you could have handed those same 42 DEI recommendations to the liberal, Democrat-leaning University of Virginia and inspired a lubricated week-long faculty/student celebration.
That, by the way, gives you one, big, fat clue as to why Virginia’s state-owned colleges and universities are so admired and extolled: They’ve achieved excellence by not being all one thing. They are distinctive and separate and, to this point, free to seek out their own mountain-top.
So, now Spanberger says she will take office and immediately make appointments to the college and universities boards. No governor in modern Virginia history has been given this opportunity. Why Spanberger? How did she get so lucky?
Simple. A handful of Virginia state senators showed up in Richmond early last summer and blew things up. They arbitrarily – with not a single stated reason – refused to confirm Gov. Youngkin’s final year round of higher education board appointments.
How many times has this previously happened in Virginia? Never.
In short, these Democratic Party senators cheated the system. Spanberger, by making any board appointments at all prior to June (the normal practice), only compounds their larceny.
It’s something of a wager. Spanberger is betting that the Virginia Senate, which faces elections in 2027, will remain in Democratic hands.
If it doesn’t, all Spanberger’s appointments from 2028 forward – likely for anything and everything -- will be dead on arrival. The public may be confused about what’s going on, but the state Republican leaders are not.
Of course, if you press the Democrats on this, they just immediately start chanting in unison, “Trump. Trump. Trump.”
For them, that is an all-utility answer to everything. Fight Trump. But the effects of that mentality gravely threaten Virginia higher education. It’s not as if Trump and his ever-so-compliant Justice Department have gone anywhere.
Time to settle matters down and think.
Last Monday, A. Scott Fleming, Executive Director of the State Council for Higher Education made the best argument for preserving Virginia’s traditional approach to governing higher education – for more calibration than deconstruction.
Appearing before a Virginia Senate education subcommittee, he immediately picked up on the opening statement of the chair, Hampton Sen. Mamie E. Locke:
“I would agree with your sentiment that the institutions in Virginia really are world class. Often I have an opportunity to speak about Virginia’s higher education system and if we are among the best in the country that does make us really among the best in the world and I think it’s important that we work to preserve that.”
Right. World class. Best in the country. Best in the world, even. Preserve that.
As a first step, that requires understanding how it got there. I’ll address that next.