Dear Interim President Paul Mahoney,
Congratulations on being named the University’s new interim president. You recently said that your “first goal is going to be to reach out to as many constituencies as possible to get their perspectives and concerns and ideas.” I received my Ph.D. and J.D. from the University — I am a “double Hoo” in Charlottesville-speak — and I am therefore a proud member of the alumni constituency. What follows are a few respectfully proffered suggestions that I think can help you try to restore the University to the greatness it enjoyed when I was a student decades ago.
First, you need to make sure the University complies with the law and with investigations about any alleged violations therein Unfortunately, as almost everyone probably knows, the University likely violated anti-discrimination law and stonewalled the Department of Justice during former University President Jim Ryan’s DEI-fueled presidency. Ryan resigned because of it.
Frankly, your assertion that you are “coming in cold” and had not been briefed on the details of the Trump administration’s ongoing civil rights investigation of the University before accepting the interim presidency is concerning. Equally concerning is that you have long been a faculty member of the School of Law, and a two-term dean of the School of Law. Yet the School of Law has likely also been violating anti-discrimination law for years, at least as far as faculty hiring is concerned. For example, it cannot be a coincidence that the “UVA Lawyer” magazine I receive as an alumnus documents year after year the disproportionate percentage of non-white males who have joined the law faculty, especially in the years Ryan was president. This is strong circumstantial evidence of discrimination, and is part of a broader trend at universities across the country.
Second, and related to the first suggestion, you need to make sure the University is complying with tax law. At the moment, it is not. For example, the University is almost certainly in violation of the private inurement prohibition of the Internal Revenue Code for agreeing to pay Ryan 75 percent of his $1,100,000 presidential salary when he rejoins the law faculty. Tax-exempt organizations like the University are granted a privileged tax status. The prohibition against private inurement is a strict requirement that states that no part of a tax-exempt organization’s financial assets may benefit an insider of the organization such as the president. The courts and the IRS have consistently ruled that any unreasonable benefit or inurement, however small, is impermissible and, this is the important part, can result in the revocation of the organization’s tax-exempt status. Paying Ryan $825,000 a year to teach a couple of classes and publish an occasional article is quite likely a violation of the private inurement prohibition.
Third, you need to make sure the University hires more conservatives and libertarians for the faculty, as the Board of Visitors directed Ryan to do but Ryan’s administration failed to accomplish to a significant degree. Indeed, during a June presentation to the Board on the subject, Interim Provost Brie Gertler not only foolishly characterized former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence as a “controversial” speaker — Pence is a Republican — but she tried to convince the Board to allow the University’s existing liberal faculty to attempt to summarize the conservative position on controversial topics rather than hire conservative faculty to speak for themselves.
Fourth, you need to hold accountable the decision-makers who got the University into this mess with the federal government in the first place. Allowing Ryan to return to the law faculty at an astronomical salary is not holding him accountable. Allowing Gertler to be “strategic” in influencing the Board’s directive on viewpoint diversity is not holding her accountable. Allowing Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wagner Davis to criticize, and arguably insult, a conservative Board member during the Board’s meeting in June for objecting to the University’s proposed 2025-26 budget is not holding her accountable. Space constraints necessitate that I limit my list of examples to these three.
In closing, I cannot remember the University ever being in so much legal peril. I did not take any classes from you when I was a student, but you are clearly a bright man — B.S. from MIT, J.D. from Yale, clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court justice, lawyer with a Wall Street firm, faculty member and dean of an elite law school. I offer the above suggestions in this open letter with the hope that you can help save the University from the damage done by those who inappropriately transformed the University from an institution of higher education to a center of indoctrination. As Thomas Jefferson aptly put it in a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp shortly after the University’s founding, “To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.”
Scott Douglas Gerber received his Ph.D. and J.D. from the University. He can be reached at scottdouglasgerber@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this guest column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Guest columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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