by James A. Bacon
Jim Ryan’s vision for the University of Virginia is to build an institution that is both “great and good,” an institution that strives for excellence while also advancing the common welfare. There are many paths to achieving the common good — entrepreneurship, economic development, effective government, strong families, vibrant civic life, for instance — but UVA’s president has settled on something else. He defines a good community as one that strives for social justice.
In 2020 the UVA Board of Visitors adopted most of the recommendations of the Ryan-appointed Racial Equity Task Force, which called for spending $700 million to $950 million to rectify the University’s historical racial injustices. The University has since ramped up its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy and poured millions of dollars into the hiring of far-left faculty who embrace Critical Theory and the intersection-oppression paradigm.
But Ryan has greater aspirations for UVA than merely to be an incubator of social-justice theory. He wants to export that thought into the world at large, starting with UVA’s home communities of Charlottesville and Albemarle County. To advance that aim, he created the Equity Center.
What does the Equity Center do? A core goal, in its own words, is to bring about “racial and socioeconomic equality.” A review of the Center’s website suggests that its 19 employees (one position is vacant at the moment) engage in a lot partnering, collaborating, coordinating, liaising, and awareness creation. But what have they actually accomplished? Has the Center done anything tangible to close the racial equity gap or is it just a playpen for social activists and community organizers?
What the Equity Center does. At the five-year mark, the Equity Center has had time to mature as an organization and refine its mission. The Center organizes its work around three priorities: youth power, community-engaged scholarship, and “knitting resources.”
Youth power is the easiest for outsiders to grasp: helping promising K-12 students gain access to resources that will improve academic outcomes. One program, Starr Hill Pathways, provides tutoring, career guidance, a summer STEM camp, and other assistance to “black, indigenous, ethnic minority, and under-represented youth.”
(The 2,100 Black students in the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County identified as economically “disadvantaged” compares to 1,900 White students. Little in the rhetoric of the Equity Center acknowledges the needs of under-privileged White youth.)
The Center also performs “community-engaged scholarship” and “data-rich advocacy,” which involves “reimagining” research with a focus on “serving societal goals of social justice.” The main work product is a Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas, which is designed to inform “collective action for change.” Related initiatives track Standards of Learning test outcomes, maintain a statewide catalog of landlords who file for evictions, and publish indicators of community well-being and “climate equity.”
Thirdly, the Center undertakes what it calls “resource knitting,” which amounts to creating partnerships with Charlottesville-area nonprofits. “We find and nurture connections between and amongst partners in the local community, across the Commonwealth, and at UVA,” states the Center website.
All told, the Equity Center lists 47 University organizations and community groups as partners. These range from the (UVA) President’s Council on UVA-Community Partnerships to the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center, which generated notoriety for melting down the Robert E. Lee statue, and Prolyfyk, a running club that aims to combat “systems rooted in racism and white supremacy that oppress black and brown communities.”
What has the Equity Center accomplished? Based on a reading of its website, it is difficult to see what, if anything, the Equity Center has done to improve anyone’s life. The Center website provides no metrics by which to gauge progress toward its goals.
The most tangible of its activities is Starr Hill Pathways, which helps under-privileged kids achieve academically — a worthy goal in anybody’s book. But data is lacking. How many students have enrolled in Center programs? How many attended STEM summer camp? What success have the students achieved — how have SOL scores improved, how many graduate from high school, how many enroll in college, how many win scholarships, and have they fared any better than students who did not engage in its activities? The website has none of that. There is no way to evaluate the effectiveness of the program.
The data-advocacy component has produced some deliverables — the Regional Equity Atlas, the evictors catalog, SOL scores and the like. Some of this data is repackaged from existing state and nonprofit websites, so the value-add is marginal.
One original contribution is the evictors database culled from general district court data. The tool “functions as an aid to organizers, policy makers, policy advocates, and service providers by providing insight into who is responsible for the highest number of court-based evictions and eviction filings.”
Another research project compiling potentially useful data focused on racial disparities in the incidence of Charlottesville police “stop and frisk” activity. The data is current only to 2017. That’s of little value in evaluating law-enforcement policy today, but the project did at least add to the store of knowledge on a timely topic.
What goes unanswered is whether the data leads to useful public policy outcomes. Does targeting landlords who evict non-paying tenants do anything to increase the supply of affordable housing? Is ending stop and frisk compatible with reducing the incidence of crime?
Of all Equity Center priorities, “resource knitting” is the most difficult to evaluate. What is gained from these partnerships? Does the Equity Center facilitate conversations that would not have occurred otherwise? Does it use its relationships to guide data-research efforts? Does the networking serve any identifiable purpose beyond organizing community organizers and creating venues where activists can engage in activism?
Missing from the website is any sense of tangible accomplishment. The Center frets about poor peoples’ access to housing, but it doesn’t finance or build affordable dwellings. The Center worries about renters getting evicted, but it doesn’t address the reasons why renters get evicted. The Center decries the racism of urban heat islands, but it doesn’t plant trees. The Center highlights wage disparities but it doesn’t work to bring jobs to Charlottesville.
Rather, the Center “partners” with the people who do real things for real people.
Until evidence of tangible, measurable benefits can be produced, it appears that the Equity Center functions to provide sinecures for social-justice advocates with advanced university degrees and to propagate left-wing ideology in Virginia. Perhaps the UVA Board of Visitors should take a closer look. As the cost of attending UVA continues to rise, is this how the University should be investing its resources?
James A. Bacon is contributing editor for the Jefferson Council. The views expressed here are his own.