Virginia Tech Board of Visitors rector challenges removal from post

John Rocovich is challenging the move by Gov. Abigail Spanberger to remove him from his spot on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

Good luck on that.

“A governor may remove a board member only for malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, or gross neglect of duty, and must set forth the specific reasons for any such removal in a written public statement. No such grounds exist,” Rocovich wrote in a letter dated May 28 addressed to Candi Mundon King, the Secretary of the Commonwealth in the Spanberger administration.

He’s partly right on this point, but more on that later.

“A telephone request for voluntary resignation, made without written justification and without any identified basis in law, is not a lawful exercise of executive authority – it is an improper attempt to circumvent the protections that exist precisely to shield board members from political pressure,” Rocovich wrote in the letter.

Spanberger, in a letter dated May 27, so, a day earlier, didn’t exactly “request” Rocovich’s resignation.

“I am writing to notify you that you are hereby removed from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (‘Virginia Tech’) Board of Visitors, effective immediately,” Spanberger wrote in the letter, which was made public on Thursday.

“Your conduct has violated the Code of Conduct for Commonwealth Appointees to Boards, Authorities, & Commissions, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors’ Code of Ethics, and the governing statutes requiring members to act in accordance with the best interests of Virginia Tech,” Spanberger wrote in the letter, which didn’t specify the alleged misconduct.

Seems that this lack of specification is the sticking point, and I’d say, it’s fair, surface level, for Rocovich to request that whatever Spanberger is alleging in terms of his misconduct to be specified.

Because it’s clearly politics – politics that I happen to agree with, incidentally.

Rocovich and the MAGA majority on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors pushed Virginia Tech President Tim Sands to agree to step down before Spanberger appointees take over the board majority next summer so that they can appoint one of their own as his successor.

That would mirror what went down at the University of Virginia, where a MAGA majority on the UVA Board of Visitors got help from the Trump regime to force Jim Ryan to step down as president so that they could appoint a MAGA successor, Scott Beardsley, as his successor, ahead of Spanberger engineering a political takeover of that BOV.

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ICYMI

• Spanberger tells UVA Board of Visitors to hit pause on presidential search
• Jim Ryan tells all: ‘What did the Governor know, when did he know it?’
• UVA Board of Visitors elects new leaders: Cleaning house from the MAGA era

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We get why Spanberger wants Rocovich out, and I’ll add here – she might as well do what she did at UVA, and proceed with the removals of other political obstacles on the Virginia Tech BOV, to head them off at the pass, before the Tech Board is able to do what the MAGAs did at UVA.

Maybe that’s already in the works, with Rocovich as the first pelt.

It is worth noting here that Spanberger was able to “persuade” several of the MAGAs on the UVA Board to resign ahead of having to go through the public process of getting a public letter basing their removal on unspecified misconduct.

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ICYMI

• The MAGA exodus from UVA Board of Visitors has already begun

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Probably also worth noting that the code section giving the governor the power to remove members of Boards of Visitors doesn’t require her to specify the misconduct.

Which, yes, this is where the rubber hits the road.

The relevant code section is 23.1-1300, which is titled: Members of governing boards; removal; terms; nonvoting, advisory representatives; residency.

Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection E or any other provision of law, the Governor may remove from office for malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, or gross neglect of duty any member of the board of any public institution of higher education and fill the vacancy resulting from the removal.

The Governor shall set forth in a written public statement his reasons for removing any member pursuant to subsection C at the time the removal occurs. The Governor is the sole judge of the sufficiency of the cause for removal as set forth in subsection C.

Note the language there in that final sentence:

The Governor is the sole judge of the sufficiency of the cause for removal as set forth in subsection C

It seems here that Rocovich aims to test that as a matter of constitutional law.

As I wrote above, good luck on that.