Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War?
Trustees of a university exist to be a buffer between the university as an academic body and the pressures upon it from politicians and other outsiders who do not well-understand the mission of a university. They do not exist to be transmission belts. My two cents are that Spanberger needs to constitute a set of UVA trustees who will be effective as the exact opposite of transmission belts. Will she?…
My view: I have never met anyone who will say in private that Rachel Sheridan has the temperament to be anything other than a disaster as a trustee of any university.
Manning has been very generous to UVA, and a great ally to the university, and understands its mission deeply.
But nobody willing to serve as Trump’s messenger should be a trustee. The right thing for Manning to have said when talking to the Justice Department was: “I’m not your messenger boy. I’m here to tell you that UVA has the resources to strongly resist illegal harassment by the DOJ”. Manning did not do that. And so here we are:
Michael Schmidt & Stephanie Saul: Some U.Va. Board Members Asked to Resign as a Democratic Governor Takes Power <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/us/uva-resignations-abigail-spanberger.html>: ‘The incoming Democratic governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, has asked at least five members of the board overseeing the University of Virginia who were appointed by her Republican predecessor to resign…. Among those… are Rachel Sheridan, the head of the board, and Paul Manning, a board member who is a major donor to the school. Both were appointed by the outgoing governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican…. There are 12 members of the Board of Visitors, which oversees the school, and all were appointed by Mr. Youngkin. The turmoil at the university over its board is the latest fallout from the decision last summer by the school’s president, Jim Ryan, to resign amid pressure from the Trump administration…. Some Virginia Democrats and school faculty members have been calling on Ms. Spanberger to have the new university president, Scott C. Beardsley, removed, saying that he was too hastily appointed by a board that refused to stand up to Mr. Trump. But it is unclear what Ms. Spanberger plans to do about Mr. Beardsley…. Some top Virginia Republicans were shocked by Ms. Spanberger’s decision. They believe that Mr. Manning has been integral to the school’s growth and that ousting board members will just continue the turmoil at the school. Mr. Manning, who made a $100 million donation to the school a couple of years ago, had a discussions with senior Justice Department officials in July in which they told him that Mr. Ryan had to go. “Paul Manning reached out directly to the D.O.J. lawyers to make sure he was not missing anything, and he said that they told him that if I didn’t resign, they would ‘bleed UVA white,’” Mr. Ryan later wrote in a letter about his firing…
I commend the following paragraph from my somewhat right-wing brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, who was appointed Interim President after Ryan’s resignation, in his letter to the Trump administration:
Paul Mahoney: Community message from interim President Paul Mahoney <https://news.virginia.edu/content/community-message-interim-president-paul-mahoney>: ‘Thank you for your letter inviting comment on the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We wholeheartedly agree that “American higher education is the envy of the world.” We also agree with many of the principles outlined in the Compact…. We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education…
On Friday, December 19, 2025 Sheridan and company fired Paul from his job, rushing the search process for a permanent president in an extraordinary and unprofessional manner in order to get Beardsley into the chair before Spanberger’s inauguration. It is unclear to me that she had the power to do so: the UVA trustees are constituted as a 17-member Board of Visitors, of whom at least 12 must be Virginia residents and 12 must be UVA alumni. On December 19, 2025, the Board of Visitors had only 12 members total, of whom only 9 were residents and 9 alumni. The Board did not comply with the statutory requirement that it seek the advice of the Faculty Senate before choosing a new permanent president.
No, I do not understand why Beardsley would take the job. The odds were that any legal challenge would lead to a judge declaring that his appointment was ultra vires. And when was substantial impropriety, at least, in his appointment: The natural reading of Sheridan’s actions in short-circuiting the search is that she was desperately seeking to entrench a president who would enter into talks with the Trump administration to arrive at “a contractual arrangement predicating assessment [of the university and of governmental funding of it] on anything other than merit”. Being a university president is a very hard job these days. One can do it effectively only if, at a minimum, one begins how one intends to go on. And this was a bad beginning.