Donor beware: UVa leaders float tracking professors' political donations

Luke Fountain Jul 25, 2023

The University of Virginia could become the first major institution of higher education in the entire country to start publishing the political donations of its faculty and staff if some of the ideas floated by members of its governing body are adopted. ... What they will find from already publicly available information is something that is already a well-known fact. At UVa, like at almost every college across the country, professors and administrators tend to be more liberal than the average American.

EDUCATION
How could (and how would) UVa begin tracking political and religious affiliation?
Luke Fountain

What is not known is how UVa, or any university, could use data on donations to make decisions. Will it cause them to hire or fire specific faculty? No one will say. ... Much like calls to track student and faculty political and religious affiliation, UVa itself has been tight-lipped, only raising doubts about the practicality of either proposal and reinforcing the school’s commitment to diversity.


Wetmore

“We should look and see does this looks diverse to us,” Douglas Wetmore, one of the more conservative members of the Board of Visitor said at a June 2 meeting, referring to the political diversity of faculty. “Maybe we got good diversity, and we just don’t realize it. Maybe we don’t and maybe it is uneven, and we need to make some adjustments.” ... Wetmore, appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Daily Progress.

Like Wetmore, many other conservatives connected to UVa floated the idea that tracking faculty donations could help push back against what they see as the infiltration of leftist professors in the classroom.


Bacon

“We feel like indoctrination is getting worse because the older generation of baby boomer faculty, who were tolerant people and weren’t out to force students to think one way, are retiring and being replaced,” Jim Bacon, executive director of the influential conservative UVa alumni group the Jefferson Council, told The Daily Progress. “The new generation is far more to the left politically, and you have departments that are already leaning left try to hire more people that think like them, rather than creating diversity.”


Ellis

Bacon and Wetmore’s political ally Bert Ellis on the board said much of the same.

“It’s a small nucleus of conservative professors here at the university,” Ellis said at the meeting in June. “If someone wanted to take the time they could research [political donations] by ZIP code, occupation and precinct, they could.” ... Ellis also did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Daily Progress.

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CHARLOTTESVILLE NEWS
UVa Board of Visitors floats tracking student, faculty political ideology
Sydney Shuler

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Luke Fountain (828) 320-6633
lfountain@dailyprogress.com
@Luke_Fountain25 on Twitter