Inside Higher Ed‘s recent story, “UVA Presidential Hire Raises Process Concerns,” frames the controversy surrounding Scott C. Beardsley‘s appointment as the University of Virginia‘s president as follows: “Beardsley has solid academic credentials… But his résumé isn’t the problem for most critics; the hiring process is.”
Just a couple of weeks earlier, the Washington Post reported it quite differently, noting that Beardsley’s curriculum vitae was quietly scrubbed of diversity references before his appointment, sparking conservative outrage over his perceived DEI commitments.
Authors
- Judith Wilde is Research Professor and James Finkelstein is Professor Emeritus in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
We think both publications missed the deeper story. Using publicly available records — specifically the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — we traced the evolution of Beardsley’s CV across multiple versions and time-stamped snapshots. What we found suggests not a handful of cosmetic edits but a pattern of strategic self-presentation that should have prompted basic follow-up questions in any serious presidential search. The résumé is very much the problem — not because it was sanitized, but because it raises fundamental questions about academic integrity that the search process failed to address.
This research took approximately one hour, the old-fashioned way—no AI.
Here is what UVA’s search firm nor the Board of Visitors found — or, if they did, what they chose not to disclose.
- September 20, 2019: Beardsley’s CV mentions “diversity” seven times; there is no reference to “DEI.”
- August 23, 2022: A new “Global DEI” section appears. The term “diversity” is used eight times.
- August 14, 2023: The “Global DEI” section remains as does eight mentions of “diversity.”
- August 5, 2024: “Global DEI” still is featured prominently. “Diversity” appears nine times — the high-water mark.
Then something changes.
- February 8, 2025: “Global DEI” is replaced by “Global and Inclusive Excellence.” References to “diversity” drop to two.
- June 10, 2025: “Global and Inclusive Excellence” disappears, replaced by “Global Excellence.” The word “diversity” vanishes.
- August 28, 2025: No changes from June. The scrubbing is complete.
The timeline matters. UVA’s presidential search did not begin formally until after Jim Ryan announced his resignation on June 27, 2025, and the special committee did not hold its first meeting until August 22. But the most consequential revisions to Beardsley’s CV — the removal of DEI and “diversity” language — occurred before the search machinery was even in motion, during a rapidly escalating federal pressure campaign: DOJ Civil Rights sent UVA seven letters between April 11 and June 17 and publicly tightened the screws in June. In other words, the record was “cleaned” in advance of — and in the same political context that precipitated — the leadership crisis that ultimately triggered the search. That is precisely the kind of anticipatory positioning that due diligence should detect and probe.
Even if this were the only anomaly, it would still warrant scrutiny. Why revise this portion of the record at that moment — without acknowledgment or explanation? Why treat a presidential CV as a document to be optimized for a shifting political environment rather than as an academic record expected to remain stable, transparent, and verifiable?
But the DEI scrubbing is only the beginning. Once we read the 2025 CV the way faculty routinely read candidates’ dossiers — with an eye toward disciplinary norms, verifiability, and the integrity of the record — additional issues emerged. Two stand out because they go directly to due diligence: the doctorate itself and the presentation of scholarship.
The dissertation anomaly
Beardsley earned an Ed.D. in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. The dissertation’s abstract page, available through ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, lists two authors: “Scott Cochrane Beardsley” and “Robert Zemsky.” Zemsky chaired Beardsley’s dissertation committee.
That listing is highly unusual in doctoral education, where the dissertation is expected to demonstrate that the candidate can frame a research question independently, choose and defend methods, analyze evidence, and take intellectual responsibility for the conclusions. Collaborative research is common — and often valuable — in faculty life. But the dissertation occupies a special category: it is the singular work that qualifies a candidate for a doctoral degree.
When a dissertation record appears to assign authorship to both the candidate and the committee chair, it raises unavoidable questions any faculty reviewer would ask immediately: What exactly does “authorship” mean here? How was the work apportioned? Who conceived the study design and analysis? Is the listing in ProQuest an accurate reflection of co-authorship? If it is accurate, how does that comport with doctoral norms?
These are not gotcha questions. They are verification questions — the kind a serious search asks early, documents carefully, and resolves before a board confers the authority of a flagship presidency.
The peer-review problem
On page 9 of Beardsley’s CV, he claims to have “Published over 70 peer-reviewed and/or edited articles, books, research papers …” We reviewed Appendix A, where Beardsley lists numerous items under “Peer-Reviewed and/or Edited Articles and Books.” We counted the entries. Excluding op-eds, there are 32 entries, not “over 70.” If you add the eight op-eds, the total is 40 publications. Perhaps there are some papers that he chose not to include on the CV. If so, why?
More concerning than Beardsley’s inability to count is his claim regarding published peer-reviewed articles. We found no entries in academic, peer-reviewed journals. All but one of the articles he cites appeared in McKinsey Quarterly or the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report, neither of which are academic peer-reviewed journals. Beardsley addresses this concern in a note, explaining that McKinsey Quarterly pieces are “subject to peer review, including by Nobel laureates,” and that internal research publications were “subject to peer review before being made available to colleagues and clients.”
Whatever one thinks of McKinsey’s or WEF’s internal quality control, this presentation is academically misleading. “Peer review” has a specific meaning in higher education: independent evaluation by external scholars, typically insulated from employer interests and client relationships, and anchored in public, verifiable dissemination. Corporate editorial review can be rigorous, but it is not the same process and does not carry the same scholarly meaning.
More problematic still, Beardsley says he “Created over 50 knowledge and research documents” at McKinsey that are “not available publicly,” yet he places them in the same peer-reviewed/edited category. Finally, several of the links he provides are broken. In academic evaluation, verifiability is not a nicety. It is the baseline. A record that cannot be examined cannot be responsibly credited as peer-reviewed scholarship or scholarship of any kind.
The point is not to litigate consulting. It is to ask why a candidate for a research-university presidency is presenting corporate work as if it were an academic publication — and why those paid and empowered to vet the record did not demand a clearer accounting.
Why are the publications buried?
That leads to an additional telling choice in the CV itself: Beardsley’s publication record is not presented as the core of the CV. Instead, it is relegated to an appendix.
In academic practice, publications are typically the spine of a senior scholar’s CV — prominent, organized, and easy to scrutinize — because they constitute the primary evidence of intellectual contribution. Placing publications in the back matter reduces the likelihood of close review. It requires extra effort to check venues, verify the nature of the review, trace the chronology, and assess the overall pattern of scholarly work.
There may be an innocent explanation, but in a presidential search, the burden is not on faculty to guess. It is on the process to verify. If a publication record is mixed — with academic journals, McKinsey Quarterly, and nonpublic internal documents grouped under one umbrella — burying the list does not merely reflect “style.” It functions as a screening device to avoid scrutiny.
And scrutiny is precisely what a board is obligated to require.
The larger pattern: corporate translation, promotional rhetoric, and autobiographical padding
Other elements of the CV reinforce the same theme: a document written to persuade rather than to be evaluated.
Beardsley repeatedly translates corporate roles into academic analogies that elevate prestige while blurring distinctions. He describes leading “McKinsey University” as “Provost-like.” He compares the election of McKinsey Senior Partners to tenure selection. However, tenure is grounded in independent research, teaching, and service through shared governance, whereas partner selection is an internal business judgment tied to firm economics and client development.
He also adopts corporate framing in the other direction, calling himself the de facto “CEO” of the UVA Darden enterprise. Deans manage complex organizations. But “CEO” is not standard academic language, and it signals a model of executive authority that research universities are deliberately structured to temper.
The CV’s tone is similarly promotional. It includes claims such as “broke all career success records” at McKinsey, being “fastest in class” to senior partner, and being rated among the “top 10% highest-rated Directors.” Those may be genuine internal metrics, but their prominence in an academic CV — presented without the context or verifiability expected in higher education — reinforces the impression of a corporate bio.
The document also includes extensive autobiographical details that senior academic candidates usually omit: a high school tennis championship, fraternity “Rush Chairman,” college choir membership, an explicit note that his undergraduate degree was “fully self-funded,” and that he ran a “lawnscaping” service with his brother when he was fifteen-years-old. This is not how experienced academic candidates typically present themselves — and it aligns with a search-firm style that prizes narrative “fit” and biography over verification of the academic record.
The search firm’s prior endorsement
We also cannot ignore potential conflicts of interest. Long before UVA’s search began, the founder and chair of the search firm publicly endorsed Beardsley’s 2017 book in unusually glowing terms — crediting him with doing “all of us who work on presidential succession a great favor” and praising how he “deftly” navigates disputes over “traditional” versus “nontraditional” candidates and the “deeper struggle” those labels often represent. When the head of a search firm already has publicly put his name behind a candidate’s work in that way, a board has to ask a basic governance question: how independent can the firm’s later “vetting” be — and how confident should the institution be that it is receiving disinterested, skeptical scrutiny rather than a professionally invested narrative?
That context matters all the more because Higher Calling: The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia (2017) was published by the University of Virginia Press while Beardsley was dean of UVA’s Darden School of Business. UVA Press is not primarily a higher-education press; by its own description, it is known for strength in fields such as American history and government, literature, and other areas, along with trade titles. A review of its catalog suggests that higher-education leadership is, at most, an occasional subject: we found only a small handful of higher-ed titles, clustered years earlier, authored by widely recognized figures and scholars. Beardsley’s book stands out in that context — and it also closely tracks the framing of his Ed.D. dissertation, whose title (“The Rise of Nontraditional Liberal Arts College Presidents…”) is strikingly similar. None of this is proof of wrongdoing. But in a presidential search, appearances and relationships are not side issues. They are precisely why boards need rigorous, demonstrably independent due diligence — and why anything that looks like preexisting alignment between the firm and the candidate should have been disclosed, interrogated, and managed rather than waved away.
What this reveals about the search
This is not an argument about whether DEI is good policy, whether consulting experience is valuable, or whether Beardsley will succeed as president. It is about institutional competence and academic integrity.
A candidate for one of the most prestigious presidencies in American higher education submitted materials that, at a minimum:
- systematically removed documented accomplishments in the midst of a politically charged leadership crisis that quickly became the predicate for UVA’s search;
- presented a dissertation record that appears to list two authors, including the committee chair — a highly irregular signal for a credential meant to demonstrate independent scholarly capacity;
- blurred corporate and academic publishing categories under the label “peer-reviewed” and claimed unpublished, unverifiable internal documents as research outputs;
- relegated scholarly work to an appendix rather than presenting it as the core of an academic record;
- relied heavily on promotional corporate metrics and autobiographical padding in a document that should have been built for scrutiny and did so in a context where the search firm’s leadership had previously offered unusually effusive public endorsement of his work — a relationship that should have heightened, not relaxed, the demand for demonstrably independent vetting.
None of this was resolved in a way visible to the university community.
Our research on presidential searches has repeatedly documented this pattern: when boards marginalize faculty participation and rely primarily on search firms, quality control erodes. Vetting serves as a means to select a finalist, not a way to protect the institution.
Faculty involvement is not symbolism. It is quality control.
Faculty know what “peer review” means in their disciplines. They know how doctoral credentials are typically documented — and what counts as an outlier that requires explanation. They recognize when a CV has been “optimized” to discourage scrutiny rather than invite it. They are also the people most likely to notice when a candidate’s public record is being strategically revised in anticipation of a high-stakes appointment — especially in a volatile political moment.
A broadly constituted search committee with meaningful faculty authority would have surfaced these issues early and demanded answers: Why were DEI accomplishments removed as federal pressure on UVA intensified? What explains the dissertation authorship listing? Why was the publication record pushed into an appendix? Why were corporate documents presented under “peer-reviewed” categories? And, given the search firm’s prior public endorsement of the candidate’s work, what safeguards were in place to ensure the vetting was truly independent? These questions go to judgment, transparency, and integrity — the core predicates of presidential leadership.
Instead, UVA’s board ran a tightly controlled, secret process that treated faculty input as ceremonial. The result is a president whose materials raise questions that the selection process should have resolved before the appointment.
The conclusion UVA should not ignore
The search firm was presumably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that investment, UVA appears to have received a process that failed to conduct due diligence that could have been completed in an afternoon using free tools and widely accessible academic databases.
There is a broader lesson here about what “strategic repositioning” actually buys a candidate — and what it costs an institution. In June 2025, Santa Ono’s path to the University of Florida presidency collapsed in public view after he tried to distance himself from DEI positions he had previously supported as University of Michigan president. Florida’s Board of Governors rejected him in a 10–6 vote, overriding the University of Florida trustees’ support, and the search reset. The point is not Florida’s politics versus Virginia’s. It is when vetting becomes theater, and candidates feel compelled to edit the record rather than defend it, that credibility evaporates. Nobody ends up confident in the result — not the trustees, not the faculty, not the students, and not the public.
Scott Beardsley may yet prove to be an excellent president. But his appointment has been tainted by preventable failures — failures that exist only because those charged with vetting him failed to do the work a serious search demands.
The Wayback Machine is free. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses is widely accessible. Academic norms are well established. A competent search would have used all three sources.
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