Late Late August
Friday August 22 The UVa Faculty Senate passed a resolution affirming University Values. In short it said “we affirm that we follow policy, that we are committed to excellence education and the exchange of ideas, the faculty senate will uphold this stuff while the U does its business which includes teaching, medical care, research etc. Under normal circumstances this would seem somewhere between silly and redundant. It’s like the grocery store saying, “we affirm that we sell groceries.” But these are not normal times.
Why did they do this? Why would faculty who should be preparing syllabi take time to do this? Many faculty are concerned about what they can and should say in class. What if you teach a class on women in the slaveholding south? Outside the college what if you supervise OBGYN residents and you need to make sure they know how to do a D &C? What if you are the faculty advisor to the Women in Agroecology club or the Black Biology Grad Students Organization? What if you teach about Israel/Palestine? And as Jessica Sewell reminded me "the Senate also took time to do this because the administration was silent, allowing panic and self-censoring to kick in. We wanted to remind them, and the BOV, that if they were going to cross those lines, they needed to be explicit. It’s interesting that the interim provost’s email stating the administration’s support for academic freedom came a few days after the senate declaration."George Mason The Department of Education decided that George Mason violated civil rights law and insisted that the President apologize to the university. His lawyers said he has done nothing unlawful and will not apologize.
Voluntary Resolution You do not need friends in high places to imagine that some peeps at Uva are negotiating with DOJ and moving towards a “voluntary resolution.” This in effect lets an institution resolve a civil rights investigation without any court cases and without admitting that anything bad happened. In a democracy that aims to protect its citizens this might involve things like a university revising its title nine policy to be compliant with federal law.
Compliance Review. The University is currently conducting a review to make sure they follow title VI, VII and title IX. Title IX may sound familiar either from the company that sells dresses you can wear to yoga and a cocktail party or from gender equity. Gender equity here means things like women’s sports and a sexual harassment policy Title VI is the favorite weapon of the people who are weaponizing antisemitism. These are all from the civil rights act of 1964. The rumor is that they started with the nursing and commerce schools. I think that this is being run by outside counsel, and I think that outside council is Mguire Woods. I think that anything that happens here must be approved by attorneys appointed by the current governor who is a full supporter of project 2025. See here for a Cville Tomorrow article.
The Policies. There are many policies on the books designed to protect academic freedom and designed to help us do our jobs. No one know if they will do any work. Academic Freedom is a privilege, and it basically means that faculty have the right to research, teach, make art, and teach what we want based on our expertise and experience. This is a privilege. This is not the same thing as free speech which is a human right and is not bound by professional ethics.
No Confidence in anything. The no confidence statements keep coming. There is widespread “no confidence” in the presidential search committee and the presidential search process. Wahoos44UVa is an amazing group spearheaded by Ann Brown and Chris Ford that calls out federal interference in university business. They wrote a letter that asked the Presidential search to pause. As they put it “In short, we told the Presidential Search Committee that a presidential search conducted by this Board, under these conditions, cannot possibly succeed. The only responsible step is to pause the process until trust, transparency, and legitimacy are restored.” The letter is here. Note many of them are lawyers so they know what they are doing. The Cavalier Daily editorial about broken trust is here.
August 28, 2025, The Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections committee axed fourteen of Governor Younkin’s appointments to Boards of Visitors at UVa, GMU and VMI. They have now rejected 22 Youngkin appointees. This is unprecedented. The meeting took about thirty minutes. At UVa James Donovan, John Harris, Eugene Lockhart and Calvert Moore. They disappeared from the BOV webpage within hours. Harris and Donovan are on the bogus Presidential search committee. This begs some questions; Can they be on the search committee? Can the BOV meet without enough members? See here.