The Politicized Governing Board

Public universities increasingly are targets of political interference. At our institution, George Mason University, we’re observing a highly politicized transformation of the governing board that we fear may soon be coming to a public university near you.

Here in Virginia, where members of public university governing boards are called visitors, the state’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, essentially overturned years of precedent last fall when he issued an opinion stating that “the primary duty of the board of visitors of each Virginia institution of higher education is to the Commonwealth.” Describing a board of visitors merely “as the vehicle by which the General Assembly has chosen to exercise the Commonwealth’s control over its colleges and universities,” Miyares added that “boards of visitors do not exist for their own sake or that of any particular institution.”

Governor Glenn Youngkin, a fellow Republican, seized on the AG’s opinion at last year’s orientation for new visitors. In his remarks, the governor said, “There is this myth, and I want to dispel it. This myth that board members are cheerleaders for the university and cheerleaders for the president … That is not the way it works. You have a responsibility to the Commonwealth of Virginia … I as governor appoints you [sic] to play that role as a responsible extension of the executive branch.”

Youngkin, who took office in January 2022, recently announced his third set of visitor appointments to these boards, with the majority of members now having been appointed by him. At George Mason, Youngkin’s appointments are particularly worrisome and continue his pattern of appointing political operatives and ideologues.

One of us has been around long enough to remember the last time this happened at George Mason. It was in the mid- to late 1990s when Governors George Allen and James Gilmore appointed, among others, Ed Meese, former attorney general under President Reagan; Ed Feulner, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation; Jim Miller, director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan; Bill Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard; and Richard Fink, founder of the Mercatus Center (a research institution at Mason known for its free market-focused research) and then an executive with Koch Industries.

While perhaps not as prominent as these individuals, Youngkin’s appointments to Mason’s board over the past three years include four political appointees from the Trump administration: Kenneth Marcus, former assistant secretary of education for civil rights; Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Pence and former White House director of legislative affairs; Robert Pence, former U.S. ambassador to Finland; and Jeffrey Rosen, former U.S. deputy attorney general (and, for the final month of Trump’s administration, acting attorney general). A fifth appointee, Michael Meese (son of Ed Meese), served on Trump’s transition team.

Two other Youngkin appointees served in the George W. Bush administration: Reginald Brown served in the White House counsel’s office, and Nina Rees served as deputy under secretary for innovation and improvement in Bush’s Department of Education. She also served as the senior education analyst and chief spokesperson for education at the Heritage Foundation.

Two Youngkin appointees to George Mason’s Board of Visitors currently work at the Heritage Foundation. Lindsey Burke is the director of the Center for Education Policy at Heritage. Charles Stimson is a senior adviser to the president and the deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Another Youngkin appointee, Armand Alacbay, is the chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. According to Influence Watch, ACTA “is a conservative-leaning organization that encourages college and university trustees, alumni, and donors to take a more active role in setting institutional policy.”

In contrast, of the four remaining visitors appointed by former governor Ralph Northam, none have held a presidential appointment in the federal government or worked for a progressive advocacy organization.

In the mid- to late 1990s, one of us worked closely with many of the Board of Visitors members appointed by Governors Allen and Gilmore, especially Ed Meese and Jim Miller, in establishing a School of Public Policy. No one can question their conservative bona fides. Given the national reputation of these prominent conservatives on the board, many faculty members were fearful that Meese et al. would impose their views on the new school. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Perhaps it was Miller’s training as an academic. Or maybe it was just the times. Regardless of the reason, in working with him daily for nearly two months, often at his suite at Citizens for a Sound Economy, which prominently featured a signed movie poster of President Reagan in full cowboy regalia with six-shooter drawn, he never once tried to impose his political views in writing a mission statement for the new school. He left that to the faculty. He did not suggest who should lead the new school, either. Indeed, at the time, board members adhered to long-standing principles set forth by the American Association of University Professors and demonstrated their respect for the differentiated roles and responsibilities of the board vis-à-vis the faculty and administration.

However, this was only sometimes the case. In May of 2000, Mason’s Faculty Senate voted to censure the Board of Visitors, “accusing it of interfering with the faculty’s domain over the curriculum.” Specifically, the censure resulted from “two new course requirements inserted by board members that were not part of the faculty plan,” including, as The Chronicle of Higher Education reported at the time, a “specially designed, semester-long course on U.S. history, and a second one on Western civilization. The faculty plan had simply required students to take one of a variety of courses from an approved list on the subject of ‘U.S. and Western institutions, traditions, and economies.’”

Fast-forward to the present day when, this past spring, Mason’s current set of visitors blocked a faculty-driven effort to include diversity-themed Just Societies coursework in the curriculum. We watched Youngkin and his board of operatives deploy similar strategies to block a racial literacy course at Virginia Commonwealth University. There is little doubt that the visitors at Mason were taking directives from Youngkin, per the attorney general’s opinion.

We are concerned about more than the intrusion into the curriculum and the blatant violation of shared governance. Several of the visitors appointed by Youngkin have skeletons in their closets that should raise questions about their judgment and ethics.

The New York Times reported that Kenneth Marcus stepped down as the assistant secretary of education for civil rights amid complaints “of abusing his authority by forcing through cases that furthered his personal and political agenda.” NBC News reported that Charles Stimson resigned his position as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs “over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects.” A report by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Inspector General found that Robert Pence, then ambassador to Finland, was part of a decision to revoke an award to a Finnish journalist due to her social media posts critical of Trump and made misleading statements to Congress about the reasons for the revocation.

It also seems ironic, at best, that Youngkin would appoint a leading critic of public schools and public higher education, Lindsey Burke, to a public university governing board. Burke wrote Project 2025’s education plan, which proposes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. She wrote, “Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.”

For those who don’t know, Project 2025 is the presidential transition plan organized by the Heritage Foundation, which, according to the project director, is “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”

To our knowledge, there have never been so many political appointees and conservative ideologues serving on a governing board in the commonwealth. We also know that conservative groups have targeted Mason with their donations. Mason is one of the largest recipients of Charles Koch Foundation funds in the academy and attracts other conservative donors who support its law school, economics department and affiliated organizations such as the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies. In the past, many donor agreements allowed donors a voice in faculty appointments and allowed for other types of undue donor influence.

Mason is just the latest target of political interference in public universities. The interference comes in many forms—including campaigns centered around intellectual diversity and free speech—and has many targets, including diversity, equity and inclusion programs; tenure; curricula; shared governance; accreditation; and even faculty hiring. As the AAUP stated last January, “Political interference in U.S. higher education has reached an alarming level.” This interference “subvert[s] the possibility that, as a site of free inquiry, the university can serve the common good.”

Youngkin may be relatively hands-off in his political interference, leveraging his control through proxies. Yet, with the aid of the commonwealth’s attorney general, he has found a way to justify directing the visitors he appoints to act as his agents. Should Youngkin be allowed to exercise his power as we believe he might through his majority board appointments, we fear the institutional damage to George Mason at the hands of those who seek to destroy it as a public good.