UVA Board of Visitors seems intent on hiring a lame-duck new president

The UVA Board of Visitors is moving forward with an effort to land a new president, as Virginia General Assembly leaders are telling them they’d be wasting their time.

“We are committed to a process that is inclusive and considers input from every corner of the UVA community. I look forward to working with the members of the special committee, who are not only incredibly accomplished individuals, but also devoted supporters of UVA,” said Rachel Sheridan, the rector of BOV, and a Glenn Youngkin appointee.

The Youngkin appointees on the Board had been targeting Jim Ryan since at least last fall, and got help from two UVA alums the Trump administration to force Ryan, the president since 2018, to step down last month.

The funny thing on that: Ryan will remain at UVA as a tenured professor, and per his contract, signed in 2022, he will be paid $825,000 a year in that new role.

Those MAGAs really showed him.

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ICYMI

• UVA President Jim Ryan resigns: Making sense of something that doesn’t make sense
• Jim Ryan explains decision to step down as UVA president: ‘Real and direct harm’
• UVA leaders lay out how things will proceed with Jim Ryan’s pending departure
• Jim Ryan gets the last laugh: Staying on as full professor at UVA

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The complicating factor to naming a replacement for Ryan is that there is a gubernatorial election in three months, and the heavy favorite is the Democratic nominee, Abigail Spanberger, has made clear that she intends to use the power given to Virginia governors to appoint a new majority “composed of individuals committed to the mission of serving and strengthening our public colleges and universities” to the Board of Visitors upon taking the oath of office in January.

Democratic leaders in the General Assembly have buttressed this point, with Scott Surovell, the Senate Majority Leader, saying straight up that the BOV “should not make any steps towards picking a permanent president at UVA.”

This would seem to render the search-committee process laid out by the Board of Visitors and made public in a press release issued by the school on Friday moot.

“This search will play a critical role in the future of our great institution, and it’s important that we get it right. That means taking the time necessary to identify and pursue great candidates, while also operating transparently and in close coordination with the broader UVA community,” Sheridan said in the release, which tells us that the committee will hold its first meeting in August.

Good luck finding somebody with the resume to be a UVA president who would pack up the family for Charlottesville to be here for a few months before we have to start this process anew next summer.