This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War?Trustees of a university exist to be a buffer between the university as an academic body and the pressures upon it from politicians and other outsiders who do not well-understand the mission of a...
Trustees of a university exist to be a buffer between the university as an academic body and the pressures upon it from politicians and other outsiders who do not well-understand the mission of a university. They do not exist to be transmission belts. My two cents are that Spanberger needs to constitute a set of UVA trustees who will be effective as the exact opposite of transmission belts. Will she?…
My view: I have never met anyone who will say in private that Rachel Sheridan has the temperament to be anything other than a disaster as a trustee of any university. Manning has been very generous to UVA, and a great ally to the university, and understands its mission deeply. But nobody willing to serve as Trump’s messenger should be a trustee. The right thing for Manning to have said when talking to the Justice Department was: “I’m not your messenger boy. I’m here to tell you that UVA has the resources to strongly resist illegal harassment by the DOJ”. Manning did not do that. And so here we are:
I commend the following paragraph from my somewhat right-wing brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, who was appointed Interim President after Ryan’s resignation, in his letter to the Trump administration:
On Friday, December 19, 2025 Sheridan and company fired Paul from his job, rushing the search process for a permanent president in an extraordinary and unprofessional manner in order to get Beardsley into the chair before Spanberger’s inauguration. It is unclear to me that she had the power to do so: the UVA trustees are constituted as a 17-member Board of Visitors, of whom at least 12 must be Virginia residents and 12 must be UVA alumni. On December 19, 2025, the Board of Visitors had only 12 members total, of whom only 9 were residents and 9 alumni. The Board did not comply with the statutory requirement that it seek the advice of the Faculty Senate before choosing a new permanent president. No, I do not understand why Beardsley would take the job. The odds were that any legal challenge would lead to a judge declaring that his appointment was ultra vires. And when was substantial impropriety, at least, in his appointment: The natural reading of Sheridan’s actions in short-circuiting the search is that she was desperately seeking to entrench a president who would enter into talks with the Trump administration to arrive at “a contractual arrangement predicating assessment [of the university and of governmental funding of it] on anything other than merit”. Being a university president is a very hard job these days. One can do it effectively only if, at a minimum, one begins how one intends to go on. And this was a bad beginning. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##is-abigail-spanberger-seeking-to-escalate-or-to-de-escalate-youngkin-and-trump’s-culture-war |
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