Category Archives: Education (higher ed)

No More Legacy Admissions in Virginia

Posted on February 3, 2024 by | 54 comments

Out of luck

by James A. Bacon

Bills to ban preferential treatment for relatives of alumni at Virginia’s public universities flew through the 2024 session of the General Assembly in remarkable time. In a legislature marked by intense partisan divisions, companion bills passed subcommittees, committees, and the full Senate and the House of Delegates on unanimous votes. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Governor Glenn Youngkin has indicated he will sign the bill.

“If we’re going to have an even playing field, let’s have an even playing field,” said Democratic Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, who sponsored the Senate bill.

VanValkenburg’s statement presumably alludes to last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting preferential treatment in college and university admissions on the basis of race. Many Republicans and conservatives argued that policies should not tilt the playing field for or against members of a particular race or ethnic group. Admissions, they contend, should be based on merit.

In this case, Virginia Republicans appear to be true to their meritocratic principles. Attorney General Jason Miyares was among those backing the ban on legacies. The Times-Dispatch summarized his thinking this way: “Colleges should judge applications based on what a student can control — such as classes, grades and extracurriculars — not the color of their skin or their parents’ school.” Continue reading →

54 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Race and race relations

Scott Surovell’s End Run Around Jason Miyares

Posted on February 2, 2024 by | 63 comments

Sen. Scott Surovell

by James A. Bacon

The battle for control of higher-ed institutions in Virginia is boiling over into the state legislature. Senator Scott Surovell, D-Mount Vernon, has submitted a bill, SB 506, that would allow Virginia’s public universities to hire their own legal counsel in place of lawyers answering to the Attorney General.

The bill would give governing boards of every institution authority over the hiring of “outside legal counsel, the oversight and management of any legal counsel, and the appointment of a general counsel to serve as the chief legal officer of the institution.”

Attorney General Jason Miyares

Public universities are classified as state agencies. Like other state agencies, their legal interests are represented by counsel that reports to the Office of Attorney General.

The underlying political conflict is who controls Virginia’s colleges and universities. The issue surfaced last year when former Bowdoin University President Clayton Rose addressed the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors and suggested that board members owe their primary loyalty to the institution, not their personal agendas. He received pushback from two board members appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin who argued that the duty of board members is to represent the interests of the Commonwealth of Virginia, not the institution itself. Continue reading →

63 Comments

Posted in Education (higher ed), Governance

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The Most Woke Universities in Virginia

Posted on January 31, 2024 by | 89 comments

“Woke” as rendered by Bing Image Creator.

by James A. Bacon

Borrowing a methodology from a Harvard computer science prof, Jay Greene and Mike Gonzales with The Heritage Foundation have calculated a wokeness ranking for Virginia’s public universities: the number of times “social justice” appears in a university’s course catalog.

Measured by the absolute number of “social justice” mentions, James Madison University is the most woke (72 references), followed by George Mason University (59), and Virginia Commonwealth University (53).

Some universities offer far more courses than others, however, so Greene and Gonzalez introduce another measure: a ratio of courses that mention “social justice” versus courses that mention “Constitution.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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“Enacting Racial Change by Design”

Posted on January 24, 2024 by | 82 comments

by James A. Bacon

The backlash against Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in higher-ed and the corporate world may be gathering momentum across the country, but the University of Virginia is rolling out a new DEI initiative oblivious to the shift in the national mood.

UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences has launched a program this semester entitled, “Enacting Racial Change by Design.” Participating faculty will discuss chapters from the book, From Equity Talk to Equity Walk to deepen understanding of “systematic racial inequity in higher education.” Participants will be able to apply for $1,000 grants to implement DEI-related projects.

The rhetoric of the memo announcing the initiative is disconnected from the national conversation now underway. The program shows not the slightest inkling that critics of DEI need be acknowledged much less engaged in dialogue. U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race in admissions? Resignation of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania? Helloooo? Anyone home?

This is what happens when an academic elite is captive to DEI dogma and there is not enough diversity of thought for anyone to push back.

Here follows the memo: Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Race and race relations

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VMI Loses DEI Court Case: a Win-Win Situation

Posted on January 23, 2024 by | 65 comments

by Jake Spivey

In Virginia’s ever-shifting landscape of diversity, equity, or opportunity, and inclusion, a powerful decision has been made. Following the sensational, yet unproven, allegations of exceptionally bad behavior and poor leadership at Virginia Military Institute in late autumn 2019, the administration and Board of Visitors attempted to quickly effect conclusive actions that would correct their unproven ills. A prime effort by the administration would be delivery of DEI training to staff, faculty, and the Corps of cadets. Unfortunately, in its haste to instigate the training, VMI circumvented the state’s procurement laws. By sidestepping the proper legal path for solicitations and contracts, VMI became vulnerable to protest by competing but unsuccessful contractors.

After a series of hearings before Judge Christopher B. Russell, the judge rendered a verdict finding VMI in “Violation of Virginia Public Procurement Act and/or the Rules Governing Procurement of Goods, Services, Insurance and Construction by a Public Institution of Higher Education of the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The judge’s decision represents a loss for VMI and its legal counsel,  an alumnus. VMI’s attorneys tried but repeatedly failed to have the case dismissed on technicalities rather than argue the merits of VMI’s actions when pursuing the DEI training contract. Continue reading →

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Posted in Courts and law, DEI, Education (higher ed), Governance

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Pleasure Activism at JMU’s Queer Teach-In

Posted on January 6, 2024 by | 9 comments

by Stu Smith

On October 4th 2023, Adrienne Maree Brown presented her work on Pleasure Activism at JMU as part of a Queer Teach-in. This Teach-in was hosted by JMU’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. As you will soon hear from JMU’s Coordinator for Cultural and Affinity Spaces, Kwyn Riley, “This conversation serves as the nucleus of the Queer resistance teach-in.” But first, how about we hear from the keynote speaker, Adrienne Maree Brown?

I’m sure most of y’all are at a total loss for words. This is who James Madison University parades out to speak to young and impressionable minds. I think the footage speaks for itself and I frankly don’t have too much to say. To me it is clear that Pleasure Activism is just Hedonism under a Social Justice lens. As a history lover, I always wonder what the namesakes and founders of these universities would think of situations like this. I can’t recall any of Madison’s thoughts on pleasure, but his ol’ pal, Thomas Jefferson said this…

“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.” Continue reading →

9 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), LGBQT

Look What UVA Is Hiding

Posted on January 5, 2024 by | 18 comments

by James A. Bacon

Acting on behalf of The Jefferson Council, Walter Smith has filed a complaint in Henrico County against the University of Virginia, seeking a remedy for its refusal to supply documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Smith serves in a volunteer capacity as chair of the Council’s research committee.

The suit alleges 14 instances in which the University’s FOIA staff improperly denied emails and other documents to the Council. Smith’s FOIA requests asked for documents that would shed light on the inner workings of the University’s administrative decision-making process.

The cases highlighted in the complaint illustrate two main themes. First, UVA’s FOIA lawyers have stretched the presidential “working papers” exemption beyond its original intent of protecting the university president’s personal deliberations. Second, the lawyers did not apply privacy protections to Bert Ellis, a Board of Visitors member who was widely perceived as a threat to the university status quo.

“UVa’s FOIA process seems designed to delay and discourage and deny inquiries that may be embarrassing to the Ryan administration,” said Smith. “The administration says it’s all for open inquiry. These are matters of legitimate interest to the public. It seems hypocritical to hide so much.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Governance, Transparency

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What Does UVA Need in a University President?

Posted on January 4, 2024 by | 65 comments

by James A. Bacon

For anyone following governance issues at the University of Virginia, Bill Ackman’s Twitter broadside against Harvard’s now- dethroned president Claudine Gay and its governing board is must reading. Ackman, the hedge-fund manager-turned-activist who spearheaded Gay’s overthrow, identifies serious systemic problems at Harvard, from its ponderous DEI bureaucracy to a tuition policy that prices out the middle class.

Every one of the pathologies he describes at Harvard plays out at UVA (although, one can argue, in diluted form). Little of this is new to readers of The Jefferson Council blog, for we have been documenting the problems for two years. But Ackman raises one point that we have not considered: what qualifications should a governing board look for in a university president?

The question might seem academic, but UVa President Jim Ryan is surely feeling nervous these days. As dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education before ascending to his position at UVA, he is a product of the same hyper-progressive Harvard culture as Gay. And Liz Magill, the University of Pennsylvania president who was sacked after her abysmal testimony before Congress, was Ryan’s hand-picked provost for UVa before she moved on to the Ivy League. Ryan is less politically tone deaf, to be sure. He is popular among UVA students and faculty, and he has said all the right things regarding free speech and institutional neutrality. No one in authority has publicly called for his resignation. Even The Jefferson Council, as critical as it has been of UVA under Ryan’s tenure, has taken no position on whether he should stay or go.

Nevertheless, it is worth asking the question, in light of the presidential de-fenestrations at Harvard and Penn: what should an elite university look for in a president? Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Governance

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Nooses, Masks and Double Standards

Posted on January 3, 2024 by | 52 comments

by James A. Bacon

In the fall of 2022 a furtive figure was caught on videotape draping a noose around the Homer statue on the Grounds of the University of Virginia. The university administration immediately declared the act a hate crime. University police launched an investigation, enlisting the FBI to help in the search for the perpetrator. A $10,000 award was offered to anyone who could provide more information.

“The facts available indicate that this was an act intended to intimidate members of this community,” said President Jim Ryan in a letter to the community. “A noose is a recognizable and well-known symbol of violence, most closely associated with the racially motivated lynching of African Americans.”

A noose hung from a tree branch is indeed a recognizable symbol of lynching. The meaning when hung around the neck of a statue of an ancient Greek poet, however, was not self-evident (as we noted at the time). Indeed, when the offender was discovered, it turned out he hadn’t been targeting African Americans at all. Irate at how the Homer statue placed a hand on the head of a naked youth, the Albemarle County man declared that it “glorified pedophilia.” Local authorities charged him with intimidation anyway.

That was then.

Photo credit: WUVAnews.com

The day after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist assault on Israel, the Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA issued a statement  declaring that “colonized people” had the right to resist oppression “by whatever means they deem necessary.” A poster promoting the October 12 march showed a Hamas bulldozer plowing through an Israeli security fence. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” the poster said. Later that month, SJP held two rallies on the Grounds. Marchers waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.” Some insisted that the slogan was just a call for solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, but many Jews interpreted it as advocating the eradication of the Israeli state and, in the context of the Hamas massacres, the slaughter of the Jewish population.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Uncategorized

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A Hostile Environment for Jews

Posted on January 2, 2024 by | 57 comments

by James A. Bacon

Matan Goldstein is a rarity at the University of Virginia — a Jewish student unafraid to openly defend Israel in its war with Hamas and oppose Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a pro-Palestinian group that praised Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks on Israeli citizens. The Israeli student has appeared on local talk radio and published an op-ed in the local newspaper. He wears a kippah, openly identifying himself as a Jew, and he was one of the two students who waved an Israeli flag on the steps of the Rotunda during an SJP rally. 

Goldstein, who was drawn to UVa by its classics program, was surprised upon coming to Charlottesville by the prevalence of antisemitism and the impotent handwringing of the UVa administration in dealing with it. University officials have declined to criticize the eliminationist rhetoric of pro-Palestinian students and faculty. Instead, the University has created a religious diversity task force to investigate discrimination against Jews… and Muslims… and other religions. Two of the eleven task-force members had signed a faculty letter faulting Ryan for his failure to sufficiently acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians.

Goldstein’s account is echoed by other members of UVa’s Jewish community contacted by The Jefferson Council, although he was the only one willing to speak on the record. A law school student spoke off the record, while parents, alumni, a professor and a rabbi conveyed the sentiments of many other Jewish students whom I was unable to contact for first-hand accounts. Jewish students are so reticent to speak publicly that the signatories to a letter in The Cavalier Daily identified themselves only as “a group of Jewish students.”

During his first-year orientation in September, Goldstein participated in a group discussion in which students told others about themselves. He mentioned that he was Israeli. A classmate, a student from Egypt, spoke up. He said he was angry at the Jewish state and the Israeli Defense Force. He thought Abdul Gamal Nasser, an Egyptian dictator who sought to destroy Israel in the Six Day War, was a hero. “He said we could never be friends.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Education (higher ed)

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Virginia Child Victims in the Left’s War on the Enlightenment and Science

Posted on December 26, 2023 by | 75 comments

Richard Bernstein, a founder of American critical theory.

by James C. Sherlock

Modern progressivism is religion, defined by Webster as “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.”

The critical theory progressive, that is to say the modern American progressive, rejects proudly and publicly, root and branch, both the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolutions of the 16th through 18th centuries in Europe.

Critical Theory developed into a synthesis of Marx and Freud. The Frankfurt School which birthed it studied the sources of authoritarianism. Their followers, as in much of human experience, wound up as practitioners.

By contrast, the leading lights of Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution awakenings, bravely in their time, stressed the belief that science and logic give people more understanding. And with understanding came freedom and the rights of man.

Logic is the principles of reasoning; science provides the principles of investigation and proof.

They led much of Europe, and the American colonies, to develop more successful systems of governance, economics, mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and education than did tradition and religion.

One development, capitalism, has raised more people out of poverty than any economic system ever.

Some of the rest of the world followed. Some did not. Those that did, prospered, and improved the lives of billions of people.

But success in those twin intellectual revolutions came too slow for some.

To that table came two prominent 19th and 20th century experiments in rejecting the Enlightenment: communism and national socialism.

They proved the deadliest political movements in human history. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Democracy and Western Civilization, Education - Early Childhood, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Governance, Marxism, Public employee unions, Race and race relations, Science & Technology, Virginia Law

W&L Students Trained in Privilege, Identity, and Intersectionality

Posted on December 26, 2023 by | 36 comments

Once upon a time university students spent their college years, to use the vernacular of the time, “finding themselves.” It was a journey they undertook on their own by sampling from a wide range of courses, experimenting with sex, alcohol and drugs, and floating ideas — and shooting them down — in dormitory bull sessions.

Now they have help. Whether they want it or not.

In November the entire Washington & Lee University freshman class was required to participate in mandatory training titled, “Continuing Education: Diversity, Inclusion and Community.” Under the direction of university representatives, students were walked through an exploration of their “identity” using a leftist oppressor/victim paradigm by race, class, sex, gender, age, ability, etc., according to The W&L Spectator. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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Standards of Learning, Educational Reform and the Blob

Posted on December 23, 2023 by | 68 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Courtesy clipartix.com

Readers opine that I am throwing ideas into institutional quicksand when advocating for education reforms. But I hope not.

For example, in my most recent series I have suggested that Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) process needs fundamental reform with the integration of learning and teaching standards.

Critics have written with varying levels of insistence that teachers do not like being told how to teach. That horse has been out of the barn for a very long time.

That is perhaps one reason why so many of them are leaving.

The system of which they are part does little else but tell them:

  • what to teach;
  • how to teach;
  • what they can and cannot say about what they teach; and
  • even how to feel about all of that.

And God help parents or teachers that disapprove.

VDOE claims, in the case of its new math SOL, to take input from:

parents, teachers, the business community, school administrators, representatives from higher education and state mathematics education organizations.

That is boilerplate.

Does anybody know a parent or a business that made an input? Or whose input was accepted? The NEA itself complains that teachers have little voice.

Education is a closed government-industry system that literally cannot imagine being better than it is. The words “closed” and “government” in that context are redundant.

To understand how it is so closed we need to examine it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Education (K-12)

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How Unbiased Is UVa’s Religious-Diversity Task Force?

Posted on December 22, 2023 by | 7 comments

by James A. Bacon

The University of Virginia task forced assigned the job of ensuring that UVa is “welcoming” to all religions includes two faculty members who signed an open letter criticizing UVa President Jim Ryan for failing after the October 7 terrorist rampage afflicted upon Israel to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Ryan denounced Hamas terrorism but declined to take sides in the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Jews. The task force’s aim, according to the announcement in UVa Today, “will be to understand how Jewish and Muslim students, faculty and staff, as well as those of other religious backgrounds, experience life on Grounds.”

“We want every student, faculty member and staff member to understand that they are a vital part of this place and how profoundly they enrich our common life as we take on that fundamental work of the University,” Ryan said.

The task force is headed by College of Arts & Sciences Dean Christa Acampora. She will be supported by 10 faculty, staff, students, and other members of the UVa community. Christians, Muslims and Jews are all represented. A challenge will be keeping the focus on how Jewish and Muslim students are experiencing UVa without getting infected by the emotional debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that gave rise to the task force. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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The Asymmetrical Application of Free-Speech Principles

Posted on December 13, 2023 by | 38 comments

by James A. Bacon

Clifford S. Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management, did a masterful job of distilling the free-speech debate on college campuses to its essence. Though he had in mind the disastrous testimony of the three Ivy League presidents last week regarding Palestinians and Jews, his Wall Street Journal op-ed describes the dilemma at the University of Virginia as well.

Alumni donors like me don’t object to free speech. What we can’t abide is the extremely asymmetrical application of free-speech principles. For years these schools, [the University of Pennsylvania] prominently included, have actively suppressed ideas disagreeable to the progressive worldview of their administrations, faculties and hard-core student activists. Now that those groups are talking about wiping Israel off the map, these college presidents are wrapping themselves in the First Amendment….

Unacceptable is the current status quo of free speech for those chanting slogans that amount to “death to the Jews” but not for those committing alleged microaggressions against the politically favored.

That is precisely the problem I have with the UVa administration.

The day after Hamas terrorists slaughtered thousands of defenseless Israeli citizens and abducted hundreds more, the Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA were free to say the following [my bold]: Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (higher ed), Individual liberties

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