Abigail Spanberger’s First Move as Virginia Gov. Was a Masterstroke
With Trump in office, those board members joined with Trump appointees at the Department of Justice and the Youngkin administration to shift the university right. Trump appointees threatened to cut federal funding from UVA unless it ended diversity and inclusion programs and made other changes: the same playbook they used against schools across the country. The conservative board members at UVA quickly implemented these changes, which were in line with what they and the governor wanted anyway. So UVA president James Ryan was ousted, supposedly for being too pro-diversity; transgender women were banned from university sports; basically any mention of ethnicity or race at the university was eliminated. The Youngkin appointees then rushed to appoint a new president, even after Spanberger had won the election and it was clear she didn’t share Youngkin’s vision for the university.
And even without any Trump involvement, the UVA board shut down the tours that were insufficiently pro-Jefferson. How to discuss Jefferson, diversity and equity programs, and much of what a university does and stands for is connected to broader political issues. There is no way to completely remove ideological considerations from the operations of a huge college. But what’s happened over the last year is an ideological and partisan takeover of the school. Faculty and university administrators skilled in navigating complicated issues on campus had their authority usurped by Youngkin, his political cronies, and Trump appointees in Washington. That’s not how a university or any other institution should be run.
But that’s Republican governance in 2026—particularly in Washington. Kash Patel is woefully lacking in experience to run the FBI and uses the bureau’s resources to investigate Trump’s enemies, exonerate the president’s friends, and drive the director’s girlfriend’s friends home from parties. At the Kennedy Center, Trump replaced Deborah Rutter, who had run orchestras in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago, with Richard Grenell, a Trump hatchet man with little experience in the arts. After failed U.S. Senate and gubernatorial runs, Kari Lake is running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, sidelining people with real experience in journalism abroad.
