Prof shades new UVA president: Not qualified for elite university presidency

A University of Maryland education professor and author wrote, straight-up, that a person of color with the academic credentials of the new UVA president, Scott Beardsley, “would never get a top presidential appointment.”

“It’s easy to imagine a right-wing online mob protesting the appointment of an under-credentialed Black woman to an elite university presidency. In reality, that scenario is moot because such an appointment would simply never happen,” Julie J. Park, a Virginia resident, and the author of Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era, wrote in an op-ed published in the Times-Dispatch on Sunday.

Beardsley was the rush-job appointment of the now-deposed MAGA-majority UVA Board of Visitors, which engineered, with the help of the Trump DOJ, the forced resignation of Jim Ryan from the UVA presidency, back in the summer.

The hastily-arranged presidential search concluded in December with the appointment of Beardsley, at the time the dean of the Darden School of Business at UVA.

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ICYMI: Scott Beardsley

• MAGAs on UVA Board of Visitors make attempt to name new president
• The new guy may be the shortest-term UVA president ever
• UVA trying hard with the PR to sell new president
• Vanishing act: How UVA’s presidential search missed what took us an hour to find
• AFP column on UVA president search fuels questions at Senate subcommittee hearing
• Analysis: It won’t cost nearly as much for UVA to name a new president as you thought

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Gotta love the shade that Park threw in her column at Beardsley’s credentials, which she wrote “were somehow enough to get him the deanship of Darden Business School at UVA, but they are surprisingly thin for the UVA presidency.”

The issue: his “doctorate from Penn,” which came from an executive program lacking in rigor, since it is designed to be completed in two years, rather than the normal four to six, and is oriented more toward those interested in working in public policy or the nonprofit world, not academia.

“College presidents at Duquesne, Ohio Wesleyan and Owens Community College hold the degree,” Park notes in her column.

“Excellent institutions, but not UVA’s typical peer group.”

Um, no.

But that’s who the since-overthrown MAGAs on our Board of Visitors thought should be the UVA president: a White guy who needed MAGA White-guy affirmative action to get the job.