The Scott Beardsley appointment was the first realpolitik political test for Abigail Spanberger.
The paper she turned in is coming back to her with red ink all over it, and a big fat F at the top.
Tough first marks there for our freshman – actually, I should refer to Spanberger, a UVA alum, here as first-year – governor.
She’s not the only one here who should be disappointed with the grade.
The new governor talked tough back in November, a week after her landslide victory in the gubernatorial race, a 15-point win that was a mandate from the people if there ever was one.
The MAGA-majority UVA Board of Visitors, she wrote in a Nov. 12 letter addressed to the Board that her team also, pointedly, made public, had better slow its roll with its push to name a new University of Virginia president.
“I urge you 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. As it will be a priority of my administration to stabilize and normalize the leadership of our public colleges and universities, I will make appointments soon after my inauguration,” she told the BOV, which didn’t heed her urging, moving on Dec. 19 to install Beardsley, a MAGA fellow traveler, as the 10th UVA president, the final act in a coup d’etat that had been 18 months in the making.
ICYMI
Background on that: a now-former BOV member, Bert Ellis, a billionaire double-’Hoo appointed to the Board by Glenn Youngkin in 2022, laid out the plan to me in the fall of 2024, indicating that the Youngkin majority on the Board was reading the 2025 election cycle as favoring a Spanberger win, meaning the BOV knew its deadline for pushing Jim Ryan out of the president’s job.
The Trump Justice Department played a big role in the scheme, announcing last April that it was launching a sham investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion program, ultimately threatening to cut off federal funding if Ryan didn’t agree to step down, which he did in June, obviously at the point of a political bayonet.
ICYMI
It took longer to accomplish this than I would assume the MAGAs would have liked – with the election in November, and inauguration in January, they would be pushing it to get someone in place before it would be obvious what they were doing.
For a reference point on that, I researched the last two successions – from John Casteen to Teresa Sullivan, and from Sullivan to Ryan – and those processes, which played out against very different backdrops, i.e., no overt political pressure, were tranquilo in comparison.
Casteen announced in June 2009 that he intended to retire at the end of his term, which was way out, on Aug. 1, 2010; Sullivan was named his successor on Jan. 11, 2010, and took office on Aug. 1, 2010.
Sullivan, similarly, announced in January 2017 that she intended to retire at the end of her term, which was Aug. 1, 2018; Ryan was appointed her successor on Sept. 15, 2017, and took the job on Aug. 1, 2018.
The BOV in the Casteen-to-Sullivan transition took seven months to hire somebody, who then took office another seven months later; the BOV in the Sullivan-to-Ryan took nine months to hire a new president, who then took office 10 months later.
The BOV in this most recent transition would have most likely preferred to have had a new president hired and ready to go before Election Day, but that would have given the Board a scant four months to run a fast-track search; they used a whole ‘nother month, and hired Beardsley on Dec. 19, and he assumed the duties of president immediately, no transition, because the predecessor had been runnoft’d.
Beardsley was an ideal candidate for the lame-duck MAGAs seeking a quick out before Spanberger sacked them en masse, because he’s 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.
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
It didn’t matter that Beardsley’s flimsy doctoral credential is an executive Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania; other holders of this degree in the community of college presidents, George Mason University professor emeritus Jim Finkelstein pointed out in an AFP guest column, include the leaders at schools the likes of at Duquesne, Ohio Wesleyan and Owens Community College.
Beardsley, with a University of Phoenix-level doctorate, is, more importantly to the people who appointed him, a MAGA, and has an active heartbeat, and he wouldn’t need to pack up his office from a college or university somewhere else to be able to take over at UVA at the end of the spring semester, at the risk of doing all of that and then being relieved of his duties.
As he was getting settled into his new digs, Spanberger was moving quickly to reshape the constitution of the UVA Board of Visitors, appointing a slate of 10 new members to give her a solid majority, with one of her appointees, Carlos Brown, voted to serve as the rector, a fancy-schmancy word for chair.
I read those tea leaves as suggesting that this was the first act toward reversing the actions of the MAGAs who had spent the past four years turning the University into a Trumpian playground.
Foreseeing the sacking of Beardsley as an inevitability, I began laying the groundwork for the rationale for the new administration to make the change at the top, publishing columns by Finkelstein, who is one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on college and university presidencies, detailing the thinness of Beardsley’s resume, that got the attention of state lawmakers.
I also noted in a follow-up column of my own that Beardsley’s contract, obtained through a FOIA request, didn’t present a substantial financial obstacle for the University, should the decision be made to move on from him.
Here’s where we need to reference my criticisms of the Joe Biden term in the White House, which are relevant here with respect to Spanberger’s first failed political test.
Biden had every opportunity to initiate a reset from the blatant abuses of law and political custom from the Trump years, but decided instead to apply the lessons of the post-Lincoln Republicans, who offered major concessions, in the name of national unity, to ex-Confederates that the unreconstructed Southerners used to recreate, as best they could, the conditions of the antebellum South, through Jim Crow laws that reduced newly-freed slaves into being second-class citizens, if that.
Spanberger, here in her first political test, is channeling Biden, who had channeled the failures of Reconstruction – which is why Blacks are still second-class citizens, and why we elected a fascist populist president not once, but twice, the second time after he tried to overturn an election to install himself as president-for-life.
Spanberger’s olive branch leaves a thin-resumed MAGA in charge of the day-to-day at the University of Virginia.
Maybe she expects that Beardsley won’t do the bidding of the people who installed him in the first place – the people who bent the knee to Trump in getting rid of UVA’s diversity initiatives, and then turned around and used those same diversity initiatives that they got rid of to justify pushing Ryan out the door.
That’s genius there.
Beardsley, yes, does have to work for the new BOV, which has a Spanberger majority – but that new BOV has already indicated that its focus is on not rocking the boat, so what can we expect the new Board to do when it becomes clear that the new president is, at best, slow-walking their directives, and at the worst, is in open defiance?
Did no one there think through why the MAGAs did everything they had done to get into a position to be able to hire one of their own – who would then be in a position to run things after they were gone?
It’s time for us to just admit it – Republicans are better at this politics thing than Democrats could ever dream to be.
This BOV affirming the vote that put Beardsley in office is akin to Senate Democrats assenting to the likes of Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marco Rubio.
You never see Republicans shooting themselves in the foot like our side does.
Our side, at the first opportunity, will default to, go along, to get along.
There’s a reason I use the term Vichy Democrats.
I had higher hopes for Spanberger.
Better to find out early rather than later on that I was misguided.
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Chris Graham
