The palace coup that took down VMI Superintendent Cedric Wins last week follows the political blueprint that had been laid out for me by a UVA Board of Visitors member who has Jim Ryan in his crosshairs.
MAGA Gov. Glenn Youngkin has had his eyes on radical change at both UVA and VMI, taking direct aim at Ryan and Wins because both have presided over moves toward increasing diversity among the student, faculty and staff on their respective campuses.
Wins is the first casualty just because of the timing – Wins’s contract was up for renewal this year, making him easy pickins’.
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Youngkin only had to wait this long to take action against Wins because he didn’t begin his lone term as governor with a Republican majority in the State Senate, so he had to patiently build toward getting the VMI Board of Visitors to a MAGA majority, the last piece coming with the use of his emergency-appointment power to add the final two MAGA members to the BOV last week.
The two, 1984 VMI alum Stephen G. Reardon of Richmond, an attorney with Spotts Fain and a small-potatoes Republican donor, and Jonathan Hartsock, a 2000 alum of VMI, who served as the school’s deputy commandant before joining the office staff of Sixth District MAGA Congressman Ben Cline in the summer of 2023, were the final necessary board pieces to get the BOV to a 10-6 vote against the extension of Wins’ contract.
The UVA Board of Visitors is already at a 13-4 MAGA majority, but the complicating factor at UVA is, the outgoing majority-Democrat UVA BOV, back in 2022, voted to extend Ryan’s contract through 2028, giving him an extra three years from the original deal that he’d inked in 2018.
I obtained a copy of Ryan’s 2022 extension through a Freedom of Information Act request, and what I learned is, even if the BOV were to decide to fire Ryan, he would still retain a position as a tenured professor at UVA at a salary in the $562,500 range.
Which, yes, UVA, as an institution, has more money than god – an annual budget of $5.8 billion, an endowment valued at $14.2 billion – but it’s not hard to imagine and hue and cry over having to hand a former president a million to a million-five or more because the BOV didn’t like his politics.
The sense that I got from my chat with one of the MAGA leaders on the UVA Board, back over the holidays, was that the majority was nonetheless itching to find an excuse to cut bait with Ryan, and I left that conversation assuming that the final straw was going to be the controversy at UVA Health, involving the letter from faculty and staff raising myriad issues with the leadership of UVA Health CEO Craig Kent.
That one finally came to a head last week, with a BOV meeting discussing Kent’s status, after which Kent submitted his resignation.
Curiously, we’ve not seen any public announcement from UVA or UVA Health on the status of Kent, which might signal that there is more bloodletting to be done that is still playing out behind the scenes.
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It would surprise me, in any case, if Ryan does indeed survive much past the November elections. Presumptive Democratic Party governor nominee Abigail Spanberger is the prohibitive favorite at the top of the statewide ticket, and a Democratic sweep would likely only increase their majorities in the House of Delegates and State Senate.
The MAGA leader on the UVA BOV told me back during our Christmas Week chat that their side is presuming that Spanberger, with Democrat majorities in the General Assembly, would exercise her right as governor to fire members of boards of visitors not to her liking and stack the seats with people of her choosing.
That’s why we saw the VMI Board move as quickly as it did, once Youngkin could fill the final two seats with MAGA sycophants, to get rid of Wins.
We may be seeing action, and soon, of a similar nature at UVA.
Stay tuned, is my advice.
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Chris Graham
