by James A. Bacon
Lefty professors are fearful that a new Board of Visitors, now comprised of a majority of Youngkin appointees, is about to unleash a right-wing revolution at George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public university.
Six of the 12 Youngkin-appointed board members are, or have been, affiliated with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which recently produced a detailed document, Project 2025, laying out policy options for the next Republican president. Many on the left have decried Project 2025 as a dystopian blueprint for ending democracy and imposing a right-wing autocracy if Donald Trump is elected.
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education catalogs concerns articulated by Bethany Letiecq, a professor in GMU’s College of Education and Human Development and chair of the state American Association of University Professors (AAUP) conference.
Letiecq avoids the apocalyptic rhetoric typical of “progressive” media voices, but she warns that GMU is “incredibly vulnerable as a test case for what Project 2025 could look like on campus…. My feeling is, we’ve been captured.”
Letiecq is worried that the new board will bring a new governing philosophy to GMU. “All the ingredients” appear to be in place for “real change,” she said. “We’ve had a strong sense as faculty that once the board shifted to 12-4, the gloves would come off.”
She might be right about that. I hope she is.
The campus culture of George Mason, with an enrollment of 39,000 students, is dominated by the progressive left. The university has islands of conservatism and classical liberalism, most notably the economics department, the Scalia School of Law, and the Mercatus Center which controversially has received funding from the libertarian-leaning Koch Foundation. Like antibodies expelling a plague virus, leftist faculty, students and outside nonprofits have directed unrelenting criticism against these islands of intellectual diversity.
The drift toward leftist intellectual orthodoxy has not gone unnoticed. Governor Glenn Youngkin has appointed a team of board members who have shown a willingness to challenge the status quo.
Last year Youngkin appointed Lindsey Burke, the lead author of the education chapter in Project 2025. Other appointees with Heritage connections include Nina Rees, an education policy analyst; Armand Alacbay, who has called for dismantling the higher-ed accreditation cartel; Kenneth Marcus, who has called for banning critical race theory from schools; Marc Short, who was considered for the Heritage Foundation presidency; and Charles (Cully) Stimson, a senior adviser to Heritage’s president. The Chronicle article also mentions Robert Pence, observing that he has criticized DEI initiatives at recent GMU board meetings.
Sounds like a fantastic line-up. This crew will hit the ground running.
According to the Chronicle, the Youngkin administration has urged board members to vote for Stimson as rector. He would replace Horace Blackman, who was appointed by former Governor Ralph Northam and will serve another year.
The article cites likely flash points as the Youngkin majority takes control of the board for the first time: disputes over the Board’s involvement in tenure decisions, politicization of the curriculum, and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
The faculty doesn’t want the Board getting involved in tenure decisions. Some board members have requested the CVs and written justifications for promotion of professors recommended for mid-year tenure approval, according to the Chronicle. Letiecq circulated a petition with more than 300 signatories calling for the Board to back off. “Help us protect Mason’s faculty, students, and our institution of higher education from political interference,” the petition says.
Translation: Faculty want the tenure-granting process to remain unaccountable to anyone but themselves so they can continue stacking the deck with others like themselves. If GMU is like the University of Virginia, which I follow closely, the result in many departments has been a steady leftward ideological drift of the faculty and increasing assertiveness about injecting leftist ideology into the curriculum.
Youngkin appointees reacted negatively to a suggested change to the GMU curriculum: a mandate for all students to take two courses with a “just societies” designation. Summarizes the Chronicle:
The administration has argued that the curricular change is a necessary mandate that will meet accreditors’ DEI standards and prepare students for civic life. Critics, including some current board members, have said the courses will impose left-leaning ideologies on students and silence conservative voices.
The Just Societies courses are “nothing but pure political propaganda,” the Chronicle quotes economics professor Timothy Groseclose as saying. The board’s scrutiny “is performing a useful service and making the campus less political.”
The Just Societies controversy reached the Governor’s Office, which asked to see copies of the course syllabi. After a contentious board meeting in May, GMU administrators backed off the requirement.
The size and scope of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy is another issue, as it has been at the University of Virginia. Last September, the Heritage Foundation published a report decrying the “dangerous DEI bloat at Virginia’s public universities.” Among the 65 universities studied, GMU had the highest DEI administrator-to-faculty ratio — 7.4 DEI staff to 100 faculty.
It’s unclear to me why Letiecq (or the Chronicle of Higher Education in quoting Letiecq) gave such prominence to Project 2025 in the article, other than the fact that leftists nationally have demonized the public-policy playbook as a blueprint for imposing Trumpian autocracy on the country — “fascism out loud,” in the words of Democracy Now!
Lindsey Burke’s education chapter in Project 2025 is the opposite of autocratic. Far from increasing presidential powers to dictate education policy, Project 2025 calls for dismantling the federal Department of Education and returning power over K-12 and higher-ed to the states. Burke’s dominant themes are reforming the accreditation process, which has become a mechanism for enforcing progressive priorities in colleges and universities, and the federal student-loan program, which gives university administrations a blank check to run up costs and tuition at taxpayer expense.
“Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel,” writes Burke, “federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.”
That’s the real root of the problem. Progressive faculty members oppose any form of institutional diversity that reduces their influence, and they want to remain insulated from market forces. They have a sweet sinecure, and they want to keep it.
Burke also threatens the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion regime to which the left is wedded. In a list of core principles to guide higher-ed policy, she highlights the necessity of safeguarding civil rights. “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory,” she writes.
Rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory would disarm the left. No wonder Letiecq and her colleagues are alarmed. A revolution is brewing at GMU, but it won’t be autocratic, it will be liberating.