On Wednesday afternoon, while students were counting down to finals and the end of the semester, politics in Richmond reached straight into the middle of UVA’s biggest open question: who will be the University’s next president?
Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger sent a letter to the University’s Board of Visitors asking it to halt the ongoing search for UVA’s 10th president until after she takes office in January and fills five vacant Board seats. In the letter, Spanberger — a UVA alumna — said recent actions taken by the Board have “severely undermined” confidence in its ability to govern the University at all.
Over the past year, those concerns have been hard to ignore. Former University President Jim Ryan resigned in July after pressure from the Trump administration over UVA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Since then, the Board has been hit with votes of no confidence from both Student Council and the Faculty Senate, and has faced scrutiny from state lawmakers, faculty groups, and students over how it handled Ryan’s departure and what comes next.
Spanberger’s letter puts those criticisms into one place and points them directly at the legitimacy of the presidential search itself. She argues that because five Board appointees failed to win confirmation in the General Assembly, the Board is not fully constituted and is now in violation of statutory requirements — a situation she says requires “further calling into question the legitimacy of the Board and its actions.”
“Accordingly, I urge you to refrain from rushing this search process and from selecting the finalists for the presidency or a president until the Board is at full complement and in statutory compliance,” she wrote, adding that she plans to make new appointments shortly after her inauguration.
By Wednesday evening, the University had confirmed it received the letter. University spokesperson Bethanie Glover said in a statement that University leaders and the Board are “reviewing the letter and are ready to engage with the Governor-elect and to work alongside her and her team to advance the best interests of U.Va. and the Commonwealth,” but did not say whether the search would, in fact, be put on pause. Rector Rachel Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson did not respond to requests for comment.
In the background, the search has been moving quickly. Records obtained by Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Cavalier Daily showed that first-round interviews for presidential candidates were scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., next week — a sign that the Board and its 28-person search committee were already closing in on a short list of candidates.
Spanberger is openly asking them to stop before they go any further. She argues that waiting until there is a full, duly confirmed Board would give the eventual choice “credibility,” protect the next president from being selected under a cloud of procedural doubt, and remove questions about whether the Board had the authority to act in the first place.
This conflict doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Since June, the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee has rejected five of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to the Board, leaving empty seats that Youngkin has not since attempted to refill. Legislators have also pressed the University over the circumstances of Ryan’s resignation, with Deeds going so far as to suggest that UVA’s state funding could be put under review if the administration did not turn over more information.
Spanberger, who campaigned in part on reforming public university governance, does not yet have the power to directly order the Board to wait. But once she is sworn in, she will be able to appoint new members — and, if she chooses, remove current ones — just as Youngkin did when he fired former Board member Bert Ellis in 2022.
For students watching from Grounds, the effect is familiar: another major decision about the University’s future playing out somewhere between the Rotunda, Richmond, and a set of closed-door meetings most will never see. The search for UVA’s next president is technically about one job, one person; but, like every all-campus alert and every no-confidence vote this year, it also asks a larger question — who gets to decide what kind of place this is, and whether the people who learn and work here trust the ones making that call.
For now, the answer is on hold. The Board hasn’t stated whether it will comply with the request, Spanberger hasn’t been sworn in yet, and UVA is still waiting to find out whether the next president will be chosen by the Board we have now or by the one that’s coming.
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