Youngkin fires Bert Ellis, my guy on the UVA Board of Visitors

MAGA Gov. Glenn Youngkin has fired one of his MAGA appointees to the UVA Board of Visitors, Bert Ellis, which is bad news for me, because it means I’m losing the guy on the the MAGA-supermajority BOV who would tell me what was going on behind the scenes.

My relationship with Ellis came about quite by chance, after I’d written an unflattering article last summer about how The Jefferson Council, of which Ellis, a double-‘Hoo, is the co-founder, had egged the University into suspending the University Guide Service, because the guides were too “woke” for TJC’s liking.

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ICYMI

• UVA suspends ‘woke’ student tour group, at behest of Youngkin’s far-right zealots

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The president of The Jefferson Council, a guy named Tom Neale, sent me a pushy email about the article, and looped in Ellis.

At the outset, we all traded pointed barbs back and forth, and then at some point, and for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of, the conversation turned from adversarial into a mutual admiration society.

From there, I found an unlikely confidant in Ellis, who I’d written about critically, and extensively, highlighting his push against “woke”-ness and DEI at our alma mater.

Over the course of email and phone chats over the ensuing next several months, I was able to get valuable insight into where Ellis was leading the Board of Visitors, basically, in my view, straight off a cliff – Ellis told me, pointedly, that it was his thinking that the MAGA majority on the BOV needs to move fast to undo the moves undertaken under Teresa Sullivan and her successor, the current UVA president, Jim Ryan, to move the University to the left culturally.

The move fast mantra, to Ellis, is based on his assumption that Abigail Spanberger is a safe bet to win the governor’s race in November, and that Spanberger, a Democrat, could very well use her power to fire BOV members to remake the UVA Board in one fell swoop early next year.

From that, I got the sense that Ryan’s days could be numbered, though we’re almost at the end of the first quarter of 2025, and he’s still in office – despite coming under fire over the failures on the part of University officials ahead of the Nov. 13, 2022, mass shooting that killed three UVA Football players, and the ongoing controversy at UVA Health that led to the resignation of CEO Craig Kent last month.

The Washington Post is reporting today that Ellis met with Youngkin on Tuesday, with Youngkin calling the meeting to try to persuade Ellis to resign, which he did, according to the Post report, though he subsequently changed his mind and forced Youngkin’s hand.

I reached out to Ellis this morning to see if he wanted to say anything about the tete-a-tete with the governor.

If I’d signaled that I wanted to grab a Gus Berger to talk about UVA Athletics hiring Ryan Odom, I might have heard back.