Author Archives: James Bacon

UVa Faculty Senate Censures Ellis for Thought Crime

Posted on November 2, 2022 | 20 comments

Bert Ellis. Photo credit: Washington Post

by James A. Bacon

The University of Virginia Faculty Senate has voted to censure Bert Ellis, a Board of Visitors member, for violating the university’s “foundational values” two years ago when he “prepared to vandalize a protest sign” by a resident of the Lawn.

Ellis acquired a paint-scraper razor with the aim of removing a large sign that said, “FUCK UVA,” but did not act upon his intention when two student ambassadors (unarmed volunteer adjuncts to the university police) advised him not to.

The resolution expressed the Senate’s opposition to Ellis’ appointment to the Board and censured him for behavior “which neither reflects the Mission Statement of the University of Virginia nor fosters the safe space requisite for the free investigation, deliberation, and exploration of ideas.”

Sixty-one of 84 Faculty Senate members voted in an online tally after the resolution was proposed last week. Thirty-seven members voted in favor of the resolution, while 15 voted against and nine abstained, according to Senate Chair Tish Jennings.

Ellis was one of four board members appointed in June by Governor Glenn Youngkin to the UVa Board, which was, and still is, dominated by holdovers from the Northam administration. A conservative businessman and alumnus, Ellis is president of The Jefferson Council, which is dedicated to protecting the Jeffersonian legacy at UVa, upholding the dignity of the Academical Village of which the Lawn is a part, preserving the Honor Code, and protecting free speech, free expression and intellectual diversity.  Continue reading →

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Posted in Leftist orthodoxy

Three Strikes and You’re Out, Mr. Ryan

Posted on October 28, 2022 | 4 comments

Jim Ryan

by James A. Bacon

If University of Virginia President Jim Ryan wants to recruit more African-American students, faculty and staff to the university, here’s some advice: Stop reinforcing racial paranoia. Stop lending legitimacy to the idea that Blacks at the University of Virginia are under threat.

So far this semester, there have been three racial scares at UVa. First someone threw a rock through the window of the Office of African-American Affairs. Then someone laid a flag bearing an owl symbol next to the Enslaved Laborers memorial and donated an anonymous check to an African-American student. Then someone hung a noose around the neck of a statue of the blind Greek poet Homer.

The three incidents generated alarm about a “larger pattern of racially motived crimes” before the full facts came in. Upon investigation, the first two were found to have no racial motivation and significant doubt has been cast on racial hate as a motive for the third.

UVa officials deserve some credit for quickly releasing exonerating information as it became available. But rather than dampen unfounded speculation in his early remarks, Ryan legitimized it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Race, Equity and Diversity

Is It Still a Hate Crime If the Perp Was Protesting Pedophilia?

Posted on October 25, 2022 | 6 comments

An Albemarle County man, Shane Dennis, has been charged with intimidation for placing a noose on the statue of Homer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville news media are reporting. Dennis, who appeared for a bond hearing Tuesday in Albemarle County District Court, also has been charged with contempt of court for misbehaving in the courtroom by refusing to communicate with court officials.

The discovery last month of the noose, which many associate with the lynching of African-Americans, reverberated through the university. The UVa Police Department and President James Ryan promptly declared the act a hate crime. In one of many denunciations emanating from the university community, the Young Democratic Socialists of America @ UVA described the episode as an “act of hate [and] part of a larger, highly coordinated effort by white supremacists to threaten and intimidate the multiracial working-class out of higher education.”

According to The Cavalier Daily, however, the motive was not motivated by race. Police believe Dennis, who is not affiliated with the university, also left a pile of items at the base of the statue over the weekend, including two masks, a “civil peace flag,” a Christian cross, and a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope, a letter contended that the statue, in which Homer is shown sitting by a nude boy, “glorifies pedophilia.”

“[We] are all so blinded by hatred and racial division [that we] refused to see the truth that is hidden in plain sight,” the letter said. ““If you live in reality you will see an old man with a nude adolescent boy in between his legs.”

The letter did not contain any racial or religious references. Continue reading →

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Posted in Race, Equity and Diversity

Not Gilly Sullivan’s Alumni Association Anymore

Posted on October 19, 2022 | 5 comments

Gilly Sullivan

by James A. Bacon

Aiming to address the lamentable decline in state/local news coverage, States Newsroom supports local news operations in 29 states, including Virginia. As Jim Sherlock detailed here, the nonprofit organization was launched in 2019 by the left-of-center Hopewell Fund, which itself is managed by the left-of-center Arabella Advisors. Its Virginia Mercury digital publication has made a valuable contribution to Virginia journalism by breaking many important stories. While the Mercury can credibly profess to be politically “nonpartisan,” its news coverage leans hard to the port side of environmental and social-justice issues.

In a nod to transparency, States Newsroom publishes the names of all individuals and groups that have contributed $500 or more since November 2019. One of the names listed is the “University of Virginia Alumni Association.”

Conservative UVa alumni might ask themselves the question: Why is their alumni association contributing funds to a left-of-center news organization?

I posed that question to Richard Gard, vice president of communications for the association. It turns out that the alumni association did not make the contribution. Rather, it acted as a pass-through for another UVa-affiliated entity.

And therein lies a story illustrating the opaque organizational structure of the University of Virginia and its Oort Cloud of satellite foundations and affiliated groups. Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Alumni Association, Governance

A Reminder of Why UVa Needs the Jefferson Council…

Posted on October 13, 2022 | 8 comments

Hosted by UVa’s Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

Here are some other suggestions for the Division of DEI:

Tim Scott, U.S. Senator from South Carolina
Candace Owens, author and activist
Ben Carson, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
John, McWhorter, author
Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of State
Deroy Murdock, columnist
Larry Elder, talk radio host
Wilfred Reilly, author
Allen West, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas
and the legendary Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest intellectuals in modern America

Haha! There will be blizzards in Hades before UVa invites any of these leading lights. Your donations to the Jefferson Council will help us bring conservative speakers — such as conservative African-Americans such as Mia Love, who spoke last year — to Mr. Jefferson’s University.

8 Comments

Posted in Intellectual diversity

Virginia Association of Scholars Readings, Week of Oct. 3

Posted on October 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Quote from “The Daily Sceptic:”  “It is a fact often noted that when social scientists get involved, meaningless waffle has a tendency to surface.”

Introduction to The Untold Story of Racial Classification in the U.S. 

Haidt Quits Academic Society Due To Diversity Statement Mandate (reason.com)

Will the Call for a Judicial Boycott Change Yale? Don’t Bet on it – JONATHAN TURLEY

Giving Yale Law School The Heave-Ho (reason.com)

The Front Line Of The Battle To Save America Is Virginia (thefederalist.com)

Words Matter: On the Debate over Free Speech, Inclusivity, and Academic Excellence – PMC (nih.gov) Continue reading →

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AFSA Spotlight: Week of 10/7/2022

Posted on October 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

Weekly highlights from our friends at the Alumni Free Speech Alliance:

Stanford Alumni Free Speech Group joined AFSA: https://www.stanfordalumnifreespeech.org

AFSA board member Lauren Noble wrote an article about Yale’s free speech codes: https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2022/09/28/yale_is_abandoning_its_own_free_speech_codes_110769.html

The Jefferson Council board member Ann McLean co-authored the following article in The Federalist, discussing free speech suppression at UVA, W&L, VMI (3 AFSA members) as well as elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia: https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/to-see-how-marxists-plan-to-destroy-america-look-at-their-war-on-virginias-history/

Janice Traflet, Bucknell University professor and Open Discourse Coalition affiliate, wrote an article about speaking fearlessly despite the threat of cancel culture:  https://www.realclearpennsylvania.com/articles/2022/10/05/learning_to_speak_fearlessly_in_the_midst_of_college_cancel_culture_857423.html

Free Speech Highlights: 

Robert P. George of Princeton University wrote about the lack of meaningful formal commitments to free speech, viewpoint diversity and academic freedom at colleges and universities: https://www.deseret.com/magazine/2022/9/26/23287389/robbie-george-a-genuine-independence-princeton-university Continue reading →

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The Shockley-Goldsby Debate: The Rest of the Story

Posted on October 5, 2022 | 19 comments

Image credit: 1975 Corks & Curls

by James A. Bacon

In August The Cavalier Daily ignited a furor over Bert Ellis, a conservative businessman whom Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. In a lengthy article, student newspaper detailed Ellis’ role, as a tri-committee chairman of the University Union, in bringing Nobel Prize winner William Shockley to the University for a debate about race and IQ.

Shockley’s views about Black intellectual inferiority have been broadly rejected by American society in the 47 years since Shockley went mano a mano with African-American biologist Richard Goldsby. But the event has been cited as the most damning of multiple reasons to demand Ellis’ resignation from the Board. As the UVa Student Council, the Democratic Party of Virginia and various media outlets have repeated the story, it has morphed into a narrative in which, to quote The Washington Post editorial board, Ellis “organized a campus talk” by a racist. No mention of a debate. No mention of Goldsby. No mention of the fact that Ellis was one of three student chairmen who ran the University Union.

Here’s what the narrative underplays or omits entirely: First, the University Union had reached out to local African-American groups in 1974 when planning the debate. Second, Ellis was one of three tri-chairmen who called the shots, although, as spokesman for the group, he was the only one quoted in The Cavalier Daily coverage of the controversy. Third, when the three tri-chairmen made the final decision, Ellis voted to cancel the debate. But he was in the minority, and he was overruled.

In sum, the portrayal of Ellis’ role in the controversy is so shorn of context that it amounts to character assassination. Here follows the full story. Continue reading →

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The War on Virginia’s History

Posted on October 4, 2022 | 7 comments

Anarchy and nihilism. Mural at the University of Virginia. Photo credit: Ann McLean

by Scott S. Powell and Ann McLean

The United States is under a cultural and ideological attack that threatens its continuity and survival more than at any previous time in the 239-year history of the nation. And since the leaders of this attack think strategically, it should come as no surprise that Virginia would be in the crosshairs of a new kind of battle to transform America.

Virginia is the key state that gave birth to the United States, and this state has more historical sites than any other — approximately 130 in all. Yorktown and Appomattox Courthouse, both in Virginia, were the sites of the final battles of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Thus, America-haters know that if the history and culture of Virginia can be denigrated and rewritten, the rest of the country will be easier to take down.

Four of the first five U.S. presidents came from Virginia. George Washington, who led the Continental Army to victory in the War of Independence, would become the first president. At the outset of that war, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence, became the third president. James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, drafted the Constitution. James Monroe, the fifth and last president among the Founding Fathers, was the brave 18-year-old volunteer soldier holding the American flag in Emanuel Leutze’s famous 1850 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” sitting in the boat right behind resolute commander-in-chief Washington. Continue reading →

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Posted in History

Bureaucracy Watch: UVa vs. GMU

Posted on September 30, 2022 | 9 comments


In a presentation to its Board of Visitors, administrators at George Mason University showed a graph (seen above) comparing the number of employees per student at Virginia’s six public research universities. GMU shared with Old Dominion University the distinction of having the lowest employee-student ratio of the six. The purpose, of course, was to make the GMU administration look good by comparison.

Perhaps it’s a chart that the UVa Board of Visitors should see as well, though for entirely different reasons. By this reckoning, UVa has two-and-a-half times as many employees per student as GMU. On the face of it, that seems scandalous.

The disparity is so stark that one might legitimately inquire if the GMU functionaries who compiled this data were comparing apples with apples, so I don’t rush to any judgment. However, it would seem reasonable for UVa’s board members to ask for an explanation.

— JAB

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Posted in Governance