Dropping Your First-Year Off At UVA? Beware.
About to drop your first-year student off in Charlottesville this week? Leaving your brilliant high school graduate who managed to gain admission to one of the country’s most selective public universities in the capable hands of the UVA faculty? Are you hoping your kid will not only get a first-rate education but will continue to share your values when he or she graduates in four years?
Not bloody likely. Unless you’re a far-left lunatic, that is.
According to NICHE, a national data analytics platform that ranks K-12 schools and colleges and universities using public data and user reviews, the University of Virginia is the 20th most liberal instruction of higher education in the country.
Out of 932.
That’s right, UVA, once a decidedly centrist university that encouraged freedom of thought and expression, lefties now outnumber more conservative students 5.29 to 1.
According to Joel Gardner, president of The Jefferson Council and a UVA undergraduate and law school alum whose list of honors during his years in Charlottesville are as long as Leviticus, the school founded by Thomas Jefferson took a sharp left turn with the departure of former President John Casteen in 2010.
The fact is that ever since John Casteen stepped down as president in 2010, the two succeeding administrations, particularly the Ryan administration, actively pursued a left-wing socio-political agenda. While these administrations often denied such political motivations, it brings to mind a line from George Orwell's 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Anyone with their eyes open and “ears to the Grounds” could not miss the evidence.
UVA was not always a politicized institution. When I first arrived on Grounds back in the Jurassic age (1966), UVA was an extraordinarily non-political institution, with the student body pretty much equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, a poll of students for the 1968 presidential election found them almost equally split between Nixon and Humphrey. Surprisingly, that pretty much applied to the faculty as tell Even when the first round of politicization hit the Grounds in 1969 in the form of the anti-Vietnam War movement, when the Faculty Senate voted on a measure to remove academic credit from ROTC classes, the vote was split evenly — 50 percent for and 50 percent against.
Gardner points to a Daily Progress piece after the 2022 election that claimed UVA’s faculty and staff favored Democrat over Republican candidates by a ratio of 30:1.
It is obvious that UVA’s ratio of liberal to conservative students is severely disproportionate to that of its peer institution. It is the second highest of the 18 schools in the ACC, where half the conference sits under 2:1, and it is the highest of the 14 purple state university.
In fact the average of those 14 ratios is 2.44:1, less than half of UVA’s. That UVA has such a high ratio can hardly be considered serendipity. There is little doubt it was part of (former university president) Jim Ryan’s ongoing effort to turn UVA into as much a social justice machine as an institution decided to teaching and research.
In a purple state, which leans left, this sort of extreme imbalance at its flagship university is concerning.
It should be deeply troubling for families who do not share far-left ideologies and who want their offspring educated, not brainwashed, during their four years in Charlottesville.
Dropping your child off this week?
You’ve been warned.
