Spanberger trolls Youngkin with higher-ed commission appointments

Gov. Abigail Spanberger is trolling her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, with two appointments to the Virginia Commission on Higher Education announced on Tuesday – former UVA Board of Visitors Rector Robert Hardie, and former VMI Superintendent Cedric Wins.

Hardie served as the rector of the UVA Board of Visitors through this past June 30, when Youngkin was finally able to maneuver a majority that put, briefly, as it turned out, his MAGA appointees in charge.

As all of that maneuvering was going on, the MAGA appointees used their status as the BOV-in-waiting to help the Trump DOJ engineer the ouster of UVA President Jim Ryan, who had been in the Youngkin appointees’ crosshairs for at least the previous 18 months.

That process led to the rushed appointment of a MAGA internal candidate, Scott Beardsley, who was the dean of the Darden School of Business, to succeed Ryan as president.

Spanberger reversed the political polarity of the BOV with a slate of 10 appointees in January, but her new Board just reaffirmed the appointment of Beardsley, so, a fat lot of good putting her in the governor’s office did, in that respect.

But anyway, she appointed Hardie to this Commission on Higher Education, so, we have that going for us, whatever value we can glean from it.

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ICYMI

• The UVA president situation was Spanberger’s first political test: She failed

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And also, she appointed Wins, a VMI alum and retired U.S. Army major general who served as the superintendent of his alma mater from 2020-2025, before being forced out by a MAGA-majority VMI Board of Visitors, entirely because Wins is Black.

Sixth District MAGA Congressman Ben Cline helped engineer Wins’s ouster, with a letter campaign aimed at insisting that Jennifer Carroll-Foy, a VMI alum and Northern Virginia state senator, had pressured an unnamed VMI Board member to give Wins a four-year contract extension because he is Black.

Carroll-Foy: also Black.

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ICYMI

• VMI superintendent addresses BOV ouster: ‘Bias, emotion and ideology’ factored into vote

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This nonsense was used as pretext to remove Wins, who had been under constant fire from White MAGA VMI alums because, one, he’s Black – duh! – and two, because he was hired in 2020 amidst a controversy sparked by reporting from The Washington Post about “a lynching threat and other anecdotes from Black students alleging bigotry on the campus in Lexington.”

A month into Wins’s tenure, the school removed a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, and following the release in 2021 of a state-commissioned report that detailed the “racist and sexist culture” at the school, Wins oversaw the introduction of a DEI program at VMI, and initiated a review of the school’s numerous tributes to the Confederacy.

This fresh appointment to the Commission on Higher Education isn’t much for Wins, but I guess it’s something.