The Daily Progress Recaps UVA Antisemitism Controversy

Posted on April 6, 2024 by | 5 comments

by James A. Bacon

The Daily Progress, Charlottesville’s daily newspaper, has published a balanced report about the controversy swirling around antisemitism at the University of Virginia. Followers of this blog will find most of the narrative familiar. What we find refreshing is reporter Emily Hemphill’s willingness to explore all sides of the issue without slanting the story — a throwback to the journalism of yore.

There are a couple of points worth noting. First, to reconstruct events, Hemphill made ample use of the video footage of the February-March Board of Visitors meeting archived by the Jefferson Council. State law requires UVA to livestream the meeting, but not to archive it. UVA has declined to provide that basic element of transparency and accountability. The Jefferson Council recently begun archiving that footage as a public service, and it is gratifying to see the media using it already.

Further, the Daily Progress pursues an angle to the ongoing antisemitism story that we have not fully reported: UVA officialdom’s thin-skinned response to a truck with LED billboards that displayed messages that Rector Robert Hardie was “unfit to lead UVa” and should “resign now.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Freedom of speech and expression

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Seen Around the Grounds… “Embodied Politics of Resistance”

Posted on March 30, 2024 by | 22 comments

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UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 11 comments

by James A. Bacon

If you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:

The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.

Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”

A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”

To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. Continue reading →

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Posted in Faculty profiles, Leftist orthodoxy, Race, Equity and Diversity

In Their Own Words: Jefferson, Whiteness, and Dicks in the Sky

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 10 comments

Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.

Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.

“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. Continue reading →

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Posted in Faculty profiles

What Do All Those DEI Employees Do?

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 8 comments

A reader wrote this letter in response to our article highlighting OpenTheBooks’ finding of 235 employees and interns in UVA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. The author asked to remain anonymous.

Thanks for sharing this article. I am not surprised at the number of DEI positions at UVA. We have long known that there are more and more people employed at UVA or any university who do not teach, conduct research, garden, cook food, or attend to maintenance. A good chunk of the rise in college costs goes to the increase in the position that are loosely administrative. When I got to UVA in 1995, we had a dean, three or four associate deans, and a few counselors in the School of Education. Today we still have a dean, 5 associate deans, and at least fifteen directors, some of whom do not hold faculty positions. Some of these new positions are related to fund raising development, grant administration, and other outreach functions. In 1995, we had 75-100 full-time faculty and about 2,000 students. We still have the same number of faculty and students, but we built a new building to hold the administrators.

As I was reading the article and clicking on the links, I kept wondering just what do these people do? I suspect they attend a lot of meetings and write a lot of reports, but do any of the students benefit? I did a quick check: in 2009 about 8% of the student body was African American, in 2021 about 6%. Clearly these folks are not succeeding at making the place more diverse. The percentage of Hispanic students has ticked up by 2% and Asians by 7%. Continue reading →

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Posted in Administration, Race, Equity and Diversity

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Sabato’s Crystal Ball — 25th Anniversary Edition

Posted on March 26, 2024 by | 6 comments


The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia is holding a gala April 5th and 6th to celebrate Larry Sabato’s 50th year with UVA. The Jefferson Council is pleased to be a sponsor. A limited number of free tickets is available to the public to attend Sabato’s Crystal Ball 25th Anniversary Edition, ‘The Road Ahead,” from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. April 6th. To inquire about tickets contact Glenn Crossman at [email protected]. See you there!

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Posted in Speakers, Panels and Events

Why Can’t The University of Virginia Tell The Truth About Its $1 Billion DEI Plan?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by | 6 comments

University spokesperson Brian Coy misled national media about how much DEI was costing students and taxpayers. Why won’t UVA own its $1 billion plan?

by Adam Andrzejewski

“…a call for us to be the very best version of ourselves and to live our stated commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion to become a better university.”
Dr. James Ryan, President, University of Virginia, September 11, 2020

Recently, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that the University of Virginia (UVA) employed 235 people in roles related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) costing taxpayers some $20 million for salaries and benefits last year.

Our report broke in the Washington Examiner and made national news. It hit multiple primetime shows on Fox News, the nightly news on the nearly 200 ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a retweet by Elon Musk, and a hearing by the U.S. House subcommittee on Education and the Workforce. Continue reading →

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Posted in Administration, Race, Equity and Diversity, Transparency

Who Counts As a DEI Employee?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by | Leave a comment

by James A. Bacon

Earlier this month Open the Books, an organization dedicated to government spending transparency, released a study concluding that the University of Virginia employs 235 people, including interns, in roles relating to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at a payroll cost of roughly $20 million a year. Characterizing Open the Books’ numbers as “wildly inflated,” UVA officials disputed how the group counted someone as a DEI employee. Open the Books fired back yesterday with another broadside, defending its numbers and faulting UVA’s own claim that the University has only 55 DEI employees costing $5.8 million.

In June 2023, the Ryan administration presented numbers to the Board of Visitors that provided the following breakdown:

While Open the Books has been fully transparent, going so far as to publish a list of the employees, titles and salaries it is counting, UVA has not reciprocated with a list of its own. Continue reading →

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Posted in Administration, Race, Equity and Diversity, Transparency

Canceled NY Times Editor to Speak at UVA

Posted on March 21, 2024 by | 2 comments

James Bennet, former editorial page editor of The New York Times, was famously canceled for daring to publish right-of-center op-eds in the Gray Lady. Our friends at the Blue Ridge Center are bringing him to UVA to recount how his feud liberated him to think about things differently.

We’ll be there. You should be too!

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Posted in Speakers, Panels and Events

The Use and Misuse of a UVA Lecture Series

Posted on March 21, 2024 by | 4 comments

by James A. Bacon

The “fixation” of modern-day Israelis on the Holocaust has become a “vast and ugly fig leaf” hiding oppression of Palestinians and giving Israelis license to brush aside moral qualms about their response to the October 7 terror attacks, Brown University historian Omer Bartov told an audience of 60 or so people Tuesday at the University of Virginia.

In vowing to “never again” let Jews fall prey to genocidal extermination, Israelis indulge in “self-victimization,” “self pity,” and “self righteousness,” said Bartov, an Israeli-born Jew who has built his academic career around the study of the Holocaust and genocide. “It’s not a condition conducive to understanding, toleration, and reconciliation.”

The lecture, entitled, “The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics,” was one in a series of events billed by UVA leadership as broadening understanding of the Middle East conflict. The lecture series is an outgrowth of the tension between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups at UVA. Jewish students have complained of a hostile environment that leaves them afraid to speak out or even openly identify as Jews. In a parallel initiative, the Ryan administration created a religious diversity task force to understand how Jewish and Muslim students, faculty and staff “experience life on Grounds.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Freedom of speech and expression, Intellectual diversity, Speakers, Panels and Events

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