Under former governors Ralph Northam (D) and Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia universities hired many more left-wing administrators, and progressives and leftists were appointed to the boards that oversee state colleges in Virginia. The growing leftism of state colleges intensified after Governor Northam adopted more left-wing policies to appease progressives angry over the revelation that he wore blackface as a medical student in 1984.
By 2021, Northam’s final year in office, Virginia state colleges had bigger diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies than state colleges in any other state in America. That is probably still true now. Virginia now has a Republican governor who is trying to fix things, but Democrats have thwarted most reforms. Democrats control the Virginia state senate, and they have made it difficult for the governor to appoint conservatives to key state posts, such as the state board of education and the boards that run state colleges. For example, they voted down Governor Youngkin’s nomination of a conservative Asian woman to the state board of education because she opposes race-based affirmative action. And they nearly torpedoed the appointment of a conservative to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors.
As the Bacon’s Rebellion blog observes:
Public universities in Virginia have built larger diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies than taxpayer-funded universities in any other state, concludes a new backgrounder by The Heritage Foundation. The DEI bureaucracy at the University of Virginia includes 94 employees listed on its website, says the report. Virginia Tech has 83 DEI personnel, while George Mason University has 69.
Expressed as a ratio of DEI bureaucrats to tenure-track faculty members, GMU earned the top spot as DEI top-heavy, with a ratio 0f 7.4 to 100. UVa was close behind with 6.5, while Tech was 5.6. In comparison, uber-woke Cal Berkeley has a 6.1 per 100 ratio….
Counts may vary from study to study, depending upon whom the researchers classify as a DEI employee. Heritage counts all staff and interns in administrative units that advocate for racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual-orientation groups on campus. It does not include employees engaged in civil rights enforcement or academic programs such as African-American or gender studies.
“The DEI staff are best understood as administrative units on campus that articulate and enforce orthodox views on matters relate to race, gender or sexual orientation,” says the backgrounder, “The Dangerous DEI Bloat at Virginia’s Public Universities.”
States the summary: “These bloated DEI staffs are wasteful, associated with worse campus climates, and are found at universities that promote radical ideologies. Virginia policymakers must rein in this dangerous DEI expansion.”
Some excerpts from the backgrounder:
“The University of Virginia (UVA) listed 94 people on university websites as part of its DEI bureaucracy. Two years ago, UVA had 1,454 tenured or tenure-track faculty, giving it a ratio of 6.5 DEI personnel for every 100 faculty members. Only the University of Michigan had more DEI personnel, with 163, but Michigan lagged UVA in the size of its DEI bureaucracy relative to the number of faculty, with a ratio of 5.8.”
The authors gave special attention to GMU.
A review of George Mason University websites also reveals a disturbing amount of radical content that is inappropriate for a public university supported by taxpayers. This is particularly surprising given GMU’s reputation as a center-right university. GMU’s large DEI bureaucracy is creating a reality that is at odds with this reputation.
(That reputation is based on oases of conservative or libertarian thought at the Scalia School of Law, the Department of Economics, and the Mercatus Center. Otherwise, in my observation, the institution is thoroughly progressive.)
Radical content abounds on GMU web pages. says Heritage. GMU’s University Life division, they continue,
recommends donating to or signing petitions for organizations and proposed legislation to abolish police departments, engage in Marxist revolution, treat Americans differently according to their race, and diminish the nuclear family. It provides a list of “action items” that includes a hyperlinked box saying, “Advocate.” That link directs people to an article titled, “Guide to Being an Anti-Racism Activist.” That article implores readers to combat systemic racism, which it defines as “characterized by unjust enrichment of White people, unjust impoverishment of people of color, and an overall unjust distribution of resources across racial lines….”
Incidentally, the authors add, GMU’s University Life is not one of the DEI bureaucracies whose staff counted toward the DEI total at GMU.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies lead to more campus censorship, according to a recent study by a California State University professor. “The rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses,’” it found.
The ability to trim college bureaucracies may be affected by this fall’s legislative elections in Virginia, which will affect whether the state’s Republican governor can cut wasteful college spending, and whether he can appoint conservatives to replace progressives on college boards. Only conservative appointees are likely to push to trim college bureaucracies. Virginia’s Democratic-controlled state senate has blocked some of the governor’s attempts to cut wasteful spending.
After this fall’s legislative elections, Virginia Democrats will be further to the left than the are today, with no moderates left. The state Senate’s only moderate Democrats, Lynwood Lewis and Chap Petersen, will be gone, Lewis because he is retiring, and Petersen because he was defeated in the Democratic primary by a left-wing challenger. Lewis and Petersen were the only Democrats who voted to approve all of Youngkin’s nominations to state boards of visitors. Mainstream liberals such as Senator George Barker (D) also lost primary elections to Democrats further to their left, such as Stella Pekarsky.
So for Governor Youngkin to appoint conservatives to key state positions, the Republicans probably need to take control of the State Senate. But right now, it looks like the GOP has only about a one-in-three chance of taking control of the state senate, while the Democrats have a 50% chance of taking control of the state House of Delegates, which Republicans currently control by a 52-to-48 margin.
As the Washington Post reported, Virginia’s Democratic primaries this year strengthened the left, and Northern Virginia shifted “to the left with Democratic primary victories.” It was a win for the “progressive wing of the party,” who will “stick it to the [Republican] governor as much as possible,” said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. By contrast, the Washington Post noted, mainstream conservatives won in Virginia Republican primaries.
On Friday, early voting began for Virginia legislative and local elections. Virginia Democrats have more campaign cash than Virginia Republicans, who were also heavily outspent in the 2021 election.
In recent years, Virginia Democrats have embraced left-wing fringe theories. In 2015, under former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia’s Department of Education instructed public schools to “embrace critical race theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.’” Under his successor, Governor Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 promoted the work of a controversial critical race theorist who has advocated illegal discrimination against whites.
Democratic-run local governments in Virginia heeded the call. Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.” The Loudoun County, VA public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”
Schools in Democratic-controlled Arlington County have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. The “key concept” in Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” the book says. It also teaches students to hate the free market, saying, “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist.”
