The MAGA exodus from UVA Board of Visitors has already begun

The MAGAs on the UVA Board of Visitors who engineered the coup that sacked UVA President Jim Ryan wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.

“There have been partisan attempts to amplify voices of discontent in the media. I am proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve done it. I would love to continue serving our cherished institution, but in deference to the Governor-Elect’s request, I hereby resign,” Porter Wilkinson, the now-former vice rector of the UVA Board of Visitors – and former law clerk to the likes of John Roberts as well as Brett Kavanaugh – wrote in a letter that she made public after resigning from the Board on Friday.

Also resigning, per a report from The New York Times: the rector, Rachel Sheridan, a partner at the Washington, D.C.,-based law firm Kirkland & Ellis, which was in the headlines early last year for agreeing to end its DEI programs at the request of the Trump regime; and Paul Manning, who Ryan indicated, in a November public letter, had double-crossed him on what turned out to be Ryan’s final day in the UVA presidency.

Manning is the CEO of health care research investment firm PBM Capital. Aside from the role that he played in getting Ryan to resign, Manning is known around Grounds for his $100 million donation toward a biotech institute at UVA that now bears his name.

The Times reported that Abigail Spanberger, who will have been sworn in as governor by the time many of you read this report, has asked five of the BOV’s members to resign; the identities of the other two are not known at the moment.

Assuming that Spanberger did request five resignations, those five open spots, plus the five that were already unfilled, would leave the statutorily 17-member BOV with just seven members.

These are the wages of the sins of the Glenn Youngkin era, which was marked by a persistent effort to undo diversity efforts championed by Ryan and the previous Democrat-majority BOV, and apparent collaboration between the Board and the Trump regime to pressure Ryan into resigning, using DEI as the wedge.

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ICYMI

• Jim Ryan tells all: ‘What did the Governor know, when did he know it?’

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In his November letter, Ryan wrote that he was told on June 26, the day that he ultimately decided to step down, at the end of a months-long pressure campaign from BOV members and the Trump Justice Department, that if he “did not resign that day … the DOJ would extract/block hundreds of millions of dollars from UVA before they would even negotiate.”

The pressure campaign worked, the MAGAs got their pelt, and an open presidency to rush to fill before Spanberger, the heavy favorite in the 2025 governor’s race, who went on to win in a landslide, could reconstitute the Board of Visitors into a Democrat majority.

The MAGA majority installed as the interim president a UVA Law professor, Paul Mahoney, a member of the Federalist Society, whose roster also includes all six of the conservative justices on the Trump Supreme Court.

And then last month, the MAGA BOV announced the hire of Scott Beardsley, the dean of the UVA Darden School of Business, who lists on his LinkedIn resume that he is currently 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, to be the permanent replacement for Ryan.

Inside job, all the way around.

I thought it would take months to unravel their machinations; I was wrong.

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From the archives

• AFP column on UVA president search fuels questions at Senate subcommittee hearing
• Vanishing act: How UVA’s presidential search missed what took us an hour to find
• UVA trying hard with the PR to sell new president Scott Beardsley
• The new guy, Scott Beardsley, may be the shortest-term UVA president ever
• MAGAs on UVA Board of Visitors make attempt to name new president
• Spanberger tells UVA Board of Visitors to hit pause on presidential search
• UVA names veteran law professor Paul Mahoney new interim president

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