A reader asked me today, why didn’t UVA President Jim Ryan just comply with the Board of Visitors directive to shutter the school’s DEI office?
My answer: there’s another election in November, and the prospect of a new governor who can replace the current MAGA-majority BOV in one fell swoop.
Of note here: Bert Ellis, a former Glenn Youngkin board appointee, seems to be with me on that point.
“If this election in November goes, you know, to the Democrats, a Gov. Spanberger can, you know, she can terminate any of the existing board members, confirmed or not, you know, as Gov. Youngkin did to me,” Ellis said in an interview on “The Schilling Show” on WINA-1070AM on Monday.
ICYMI
- Youngkin fires Bert Ellis, my guy on the UVA Board of Visitors
- Youngkin, Ellis leading far-right push to keep the number of Black students at UVA in line
- Bert Ellis offers ‘apology’ for insults of UVA board, administrators revealed in texts
- ‘Wokeness’ critic: ‘White privilege’ is used for division at University of Virginia
- UVA has been overrun by ‘Wokeness,’ according to DEI critic appointed to Board of Visitors
How’s that for saying thanks to a guy who did your political bidding for you for the better part of three years, amirite?
Ellis had confided in me last fall, after we bonded over our mutual frustration with the UVA Football program, that the Youngkin-appointee majority on the BOV had Ryan in its crosshairs, and that getting Ryan out of the job was a top priority ahead of the 2025 election, with Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic Party nominee, the clear favorite.
I find it interesting that Ellis, in the interview with Rob Schilling, the host of “The Schilling Show,” and a former one-term member of Charlottesville City Council, tried to diminish the hard-right turn that the Youngkin appointees has brought to the Board of Visitors, but I think he was doing that to try to paint Ryan as being unwilling to moderate the way he does things – and the way Ellis framed things, it feels as much personal for him as it is political.
“Elections have consequences. Glenn Youngkin was elected governor. Glenn Youngkin got to choose the board members at the University of Virginia and other public universities in the state. He got to choose people that are more moderate or conservative than prior governors had, and this board, over a period, you know, of the three, four years, effective July, of Gov. Youngkin’s appointees has moved towards the right. It’s not a hard-right board, but it has moved to the right,” Ellis said.
“Jim Ryan could have accommodated this board and moved towards the right,” Ellis said. “Many times, I met with him and told him, I’m not trying to move, you know, in my one role as one person on the board, when I was on the board, I wasn’t trying to move the University of Virginia to the hard right. I wasn’t trying to make a Hillsdale out of it or anything like that. I just wanted it to move from hard left towards the middle. And there were many ways Jim Ryan could have accommodated that and gotten great credit for it.”
ICYMI
- Jim Ryan explains decision to step down as UVA president: ‘Real and direct harm’
- UVA President Jim Ryan resigns: Making sense of something that doesn’t make sense
It’s telling that Ellis thinks the MAGA audience listening in to “The Schilling Show” would believe that the BOV ordering the dissolution of the DEI office and pushing UVA Health to roll back its gender-affirming care for trans teens is the board moving “towards the middle.”
Schilling, who, give him credit, he turned that one term on Charlottesville City Council into a career being a hard-right radio host in an 80 percent Democratic city, pushed Ellis back from the middle with a question on what would happen if the BOV were to end up hiring a “right-minded” person to be the next UVA president.
“You could increase the diversity of hiring and political diversity of hiring,” Ellis said. “Right now, it is well-known that nobody gets hired at this university that is conservative or even moderate, or you know, or Christian or anything like that. And, you know, those that are the, you know, the seven or eight faculty members that are still of that persuasion, in any form or fashion, will tell people, don’t admit it. If you are, you won’t get hired. That’s got to change.”
What he’s saying there: on the one hand, we need to get rid of DEI, which puts quotas in place to govern how many women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people we hire, but on the other hand, we need to put quotas in place to make sure we hire enough conservatives.
It’s clearly political for Ellis, which is fine – it’s not against the law to be political – but the digs of a personal nature at Ryan aren’t a good look.
Ellis dismissed Ryan’s public statement on his resignation as “telling everybody what a martyr he was, or is.”
“His letter to the faculty had every excuse in it, except for the dog ate my homework,” Ellis said.
To use a football analogy, that’s throwing a touchdown pass up 58-7 with 20 seconds left.
Get in victory formation already; you won the game.
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Chris Graham
