Two wrongs don’t make a right, is the old saying – which doesn’t explain the newly appointed UVA Board of Visitors voting on Thursday to affirm the selection of the dramatically unqualified Scott Beardsley to be the 10th president of the University of Virginia, in the interest of not rocking the boat.
Good work, Spanberger appointees – you finished the job started by Glenn Youngkin and Harmeet Dhillon to get the University running under the thumb of a MAGA.
They couldn’t have done it without you.
Literally.
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The attempt to save face here is the vote by the BOV to get its Audit, Compliance, and Risk Committee to review the process used to select Beardsley.
Cutting to the chase: it was a rush job, trying to beat the deadline of an election and inauguration, and Beardsley, with an active heartbeat, couldn’t turn down the offer of a lifetime that he hadn’t earned.
“The intent of this review is to be as transparent as we can about how the search for UVA’s 10th president was conducted and to strengthen the University’s playbook for future executive searches, not to revisit the outcome of that search,” Rector Carlos M. Brown said in a mealy-mouthed statement, which is apparently the only kind we can get from UVA types these days.
Brown was a Ralph Northam appointee to the Board in 2021, and was reappointed by Abigail Spanberger earlier this year.
Spanberger, you may remember, had made issue of the previous BOV continuing to push through the presidential appointment process after she was elected in November, noting in a Nov. 12 letter that “the actions of the Board of Visitors have severely undermined the public’s and the University community’s confidence in the Board’s ability to govern productively, transparently and in the best interests of the University.”
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She also urged the Board to “refrain from rushing this search process and from selecting the finalists for the presidency or a president until the Board is at full complement and in statutory compliance, meaning that I have appointed and the General Assembly has confirmed new Board members.”
That, we now know, was a mere PR stunt.
Beardsley’s razor-thin resume has been under fire from critics of his appointment since the news of the announcement got out in December.
ICYMI
- Vanishing act: How UVA’s presidential search missed what took us an hour to find
- Prof shades new UVA president: Not qualified for elite university presidency
- When the president’s doctorate doesn’t match the institution’s mission
His doctoral credential is an executive Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania; other holders of this degree in the community of college presidents include the leaders at schools the likes of at Duquesne, Ohio Wesleyan and Owens Community College.
The Glenn Youngkin-majority UVA Board of Visitors was OK with that, because Beardsley is one of them – his resume, at the time of his hiring, listed him as a senior advisor with The Carlyle Group, which was led by Youngkin, until Youngkin stepped down as the co-CEO in 2020 to run for governor in the 2021 cycle.
Beardsley was touted in the press release from UVA as being an alum of McKinsey, the multinational consultant firm that we can thank, at least in part, for things like Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, delaying action on climate change.
Having a McKinsey guy as the president of the state’s flagship university is not something to brag about.
That was, until today, the problem of the Youngkin BOV.
Now it’s the Spanberger BOV that owns the Scott Beardsley mistake.
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Chris Graham
