BY HANK REICHMAN

The appointment of Scott C. Beardsley, an inside candidate, as president of the University of Virginia has garnered more than its share of controversy, as Inside Higher Ed has reported here and here. The vacancy resulted from the departure of President James Ryan, who resigned under pressure as Virginia Board of Visitors leaders negotiated an agreement with the Trump Department of Justice to close investigations into alleged civil rights violations. Ryan has accused the board of in effect engineering his ouster.

The board’s appointment of Beardsley came despite calls by Democratic governor-elect Abigail Spanberger and state legislators to pause the search until she could name new board members. The AAUP chapter, the faculty senate, the student council and nine out of fourteen academic deans issued similar calls for the search to be delayed. Many raised concerns regarding the composition of the board, dominated by appointees of outgoing far-right Governor Glenn Youngkin. Virginia law requires twelve of the seventeen board members to be Virginia residents and alumni of the university. Currently, the board, with five vacancies, has nine Virginia residents and nine alumni of the university.

As the above cited articles note, Beardsley’s appointment raised serious process concerns. “The presidential search, problematic from the start and resulting in this appointment, represents the Board’s continued failure to engage in authentic shared governance with the faculty,” the AAUP chapter declared. “To accept the result of this tainted process and its appointee as legitimate would be to turn a blind eye to the misfeasance that has reigned at the university since March.”

But process concerns are not, as some might have it, mainly about appearances. There’s a reason to demand that administrative searches not only adhere to law and established policy but that shared governance—especially the informed and effective participation of qualified faculty representatives—play a central role. That’s because searches conducted behind closed doors, by individuals uninvolved and often entirely unfamiliar with an institution’s daily operations (and even its basic mission), usually with the assistance of a paid search firm (whose operatives may have conflicts of interest and many times are, well, simply incompetent), can and too often do lead to the hiring of problematic and even unqualified candidates.

And that may be what happened at UVA, at least according to a lengthy op-ed by two George Mason University professors—Judith Wilde, research professor, and James Finkelstein, professor emeritus in the Schar School of Policy and Government—published in the Augusta Free Press, which serves Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley area. It merits circulation beyond the reach of a regional newspaper as its lessons are applicable well beyond this case.

I won’t go into all the damning detail (you should read the entire piece) but the key discovery, unearthed after just an hour of internet research, is that Beardsley repeatedly revised his CV to accord with presumed fashions regarding  DEI. This was “not a handful of cosmetic edits but a pattern of strategic self-presentation that should have prompted basic follow-up questions in any serious presidential search. The résumé is very much the problem—not because it was sanitized, but because it raises fundamental questions about academic integrity that the search process failed to address.”

Here is how Wilde and Finkelstein summarize their conclusions:

A candidate for one of the most prestigious presidencies in American higher education submitted materials that, at a minimum:

• systematically removed documented accomplishments in the midst of a politically charged leadership crisis that quickly became the predicate for UVA’s search;
• presented a dissertation record that appears to list two authors, including the committee chair — a highly irregular signal for a credential meant to demonstrate independent scholarly capacity;
• blurred corporate and academic publishing categories under the label “peer-reviewed” and claimed unpublished, unverifiable internal documents as research outputs;
• relegated scholarly work to an appendix rather than presenting it as the core of an academic record;
• relied heavily on promotional corporate metrics and autobiographical padding in a document that should have been built for scrutiny and did so in a context where the search firm’s leadership had previously offered unusually effusive public endorsement of his work — a relationship that should have heightened, not relaxed, the demand for demonstrably independent vetting.

None of this was resolved in a way visible to the university community.

The authors question whether the search firm employed by the board was operating in good faith. “Long before UVA’s search began, the founder and chair of the search firm publicly endorsed Beardsley’s 2017 book in unusually glowing terms . . . .  When the head of a search firm already has publicly put his name behind a candidate’s work in that way, a board has to ask a basic governance question: how independent can the firm’s later ‘vetting’ be—and how confident should the institution be that it is receiving disinterested, skeptical scrutiny rather than a professionally invested narrative?

“The search firm was presumably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that investment, UVA appears to have received a process that failed to conduct due diligence that could have been completed in an afternoon using free tools and widely accessible academic databases,” they conclude.

But the broader lesson to be learned from Wilde and Finkelstein’s examination of the search process and Beardsley’s problematic credentials is this:

Our research on presidential searches has repeatedly documented this pattern: when boards marginalize faculty participation and rely primarily on search firms, quality control erodes.  Vetting serves as a means to select a finalist, not a way to protect the institution.

Faculty involvement is not symbolism.  It is quality control.

Faculty know what “peer review” means in their disciplines.  They know how doctoral credentials are typically documented — and what counts as an outlier that requires explanation.  They recognize when a CV has been “optimized” to discourage scrutiny rather than invite it.  They are also the people most likely to notice when a candidate’s public record is being strategically revised in anticipation of a high-stakes appointment — especially in a volatile political moment.

A broadly constituted search committee with meaningful faculty authority would have surfaced these issues early and demanded answers: Why were DEI accomplishments removed as federal pressure on UVA intensified?  What explains the dissertation authorship listing?  Why was the publication record pushed into an appendix?  Why were corporate documents presented under “peer-reviewed” categories?  And, given the search firm’s prior public endorsement of the candidate’s work, what safeguards were in place to ensure the vetting was truly independent?  These questions go to judgment, transparency, and integrity — the core predicates of presidential leadership.

Instead, UVA’s board ran a tightly controlled, secret process that treated faculty input as ceremonial.  The result is a president whose materials raise questions that the selection process should have resolved before the appointment. . . .

It is when vetting becomes theater, and candidates feel compelled to edit the record rather than defend it, that credibility evaporates.  Nobody ends up confident in the result — not the trustees, not the faculty, not the students, and not the public.

Scott Beardsley may yet prove to be an excellent president.  But his appointment has been tainted by preventable failures — failures that exist only because those charged with vetting him failed to do the work a serious search demands.

I will, however, offer one caveat to this important and excellent conclusion. I, for one, am sadly not entirely convinced that even such a search committee, with “meaningful faculty authority,” would definitely have surfaced these issues. Clearly without such a committee there would be little to no chance. However, having served on several such committees, I can testify that much depends on not only the quality, courage, and representative character of the faculty members involved, but even more on the willingness of trustees, administrators, and search firms to acknowledge, much less listen to, faculty expertise. We cannot be satisfied with the appointment of faculty who remain powerless, even serving as mere window dressing. It is precisely, I will add, because we have over time too often accepted weakened and disempowered forms of shared governance that the very concept is now under such withering attack.

Even if Virginia Democrats succeed in reshaping the Board of Visitors, and even if this appointment is consequently undone, shared governance will not be ensured. The faculty must demand it and fight for it. That is the most important lesson.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March 2025. He is a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Government of Colleges and Universities.