Q&A: After year of turmoil, new U.Va. president is optimistic

Within the second half of 2025, the University of Virginia cycled through three presidents, and on Jan. 1, Scott Beardsley started his tenure as the 10th president of the state’s flagship university.

Coming on the heels of Jim Ryan’s July 2025 resignation and the university’s controversial settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice under interim President Paul G. Mahoney and a politically conservative board of visitors, Beardsley’s promotion from three-term dean of the Darden School of Business to president sparked more contention in late 2025.

After Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a U.Va. alumna and Democrat, won election, she requested in mid-November 2025 that the university pause its search for its next president. This was because she expected to fill five empty seats on U.Va.’s board due to a fight between Republican former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration and state Senate Democrats, who refused to confirm Youngkin’s appointees to three universities’ boards, including U.Va.’s.

While the U.Va. Faculty Senate and state Democrats backed Spanberger’s request to wait, U.Va.’s board moved ahead and named Beardsley its next president the week before Christmas — yielding sharp criticism on X by state Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, the Senate’s president pro tempore, who advised Beardsley to “buckle up.”

In subsequent weeks, though, conservative critics deemed Beardsley overly “woke” due to his leadership at Darden during the 2020 racial justice reckoning, while progressive critics questioned his academic bona fides, noting that Beardsley came to U.Va. in 2015 after two decades working for consulting giant McKinsey & Co. Faculty members were largely critical of what they saw as a politically charged rush to name a president acceptable to the outgoing Youngkin administration.

Beardsley now answers to a 17-member board of visitors driven by 10 new Spanberger appointees (five Youngkin appointees resigned in January). And he inherited a university without a full-time provost, hospital CEO, or medical and business deans. In March, Beardsley announced a pause in the search for a new provost due to the change in the board’s makeup.

Even so, in an early April interview with Virginia Business, Beardsley voiced optimism. This year, U.Va. received a record number of student applications, while construction and hiring hummed along for the university’s $350 million Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology, expected to launch in 2027. Meanwhile, U.Va. has suffered no significant loss of federal research grant funding, despite threats last year from the Trump administration amid Ryan’s resignation.

As for building trust, Beardsley says he has “a good working relationship” with U.Va.’s new board of visitors and also has met with faculty members and state legislators over his initial weeks as president, meetings in which he does “a lot of listening.”

Virginia Business: Do you view the opportunity to hire a slate of new university leaders, such as a provost and medical dean, as an opportunity for you to shape U.Va.’s future?

Beardsley: I think every transition is opportunity in some regards, but you also need to figure out where things are going well and where you want to sustain good momentum. So, it’s not about just changing everything.

This year, applications reached over 80,000 to the undergraduate program, an all-time record, [and we had] lots of momentum in athletics. The women’s swim team just won their sixth consecutive national title. If I look at the health care system, we had more than a million patient visits. It’s been growing as well.

There’s also, every year, opportunities to hire people. For example, we just hired one of the top neurosurgeons in the country [as neurosurgery chair], [Dr.] Aaron Dumont, to come back to U.Va., where he had once studied. We have a number of dean searches [and] the provost search. In a large institution like U.Va., where we have approximately 55,000 faculty, staff and students, you always have some openings. The number of applications we get for key positions is really strong. My lens on things is [to] get the best people you can and then … get out of their way, let them do their job and do the best they can do.

VB: You said this spring you had to reset the provost search because there are so many new board members. When do you think that position will be filled?

Beardsley: The good news is we’ve got a strong interim leader, Brie Gertler. The main point is that we want to have a search that is consistent from beginning to end, and there’s so many moving pieces. We just felt we’d like to take the time necessary to get a committee, and we had so many changes. We had three rectors, four presidents, multiple committee chairs, 10 new board members, and you’re running a search in the middle of all that.

The search will resume probably towards the end of the summer, let’s say roughly around Labor Day. I would think that we would have a full-time provost by the end of the 2026-27 academic year, meaning by June 30, 2027. It could be before; it could be longer.

I think everybody is comfortable with … pausing and just resuming. The feedback has been … extremely positive, normal, no drama, straight down the middle.

VB: But there was a lot of drama last year, with President Jim Ryan’s resignation and the federal civil rights investigation. Faculty members were vocal about their displeasure with the former U.Va. Board of Visitors leadership, including the timing of your hiring before Gov. Abigail Spanberger took office. How are you helping to rebuild relationships and trust?

Beardsley: I would say that I have a good working relationship with the new board. They just affirmed their support. A number of them are new, but some of them I knew before because they were on my board at Darden.

The way I’ve been approaching things is to listen, get a lot of input. I’ve gone to Richmond, had a lot of one-on-one meetings with different legislators. I’ve met with the Faculty Senate when I was leading the provost search. They’re a good organization. I get along very well with them. I feel like the solution I’ve been using is to go listen.

You know, when you’re a new president, you don’t know everything. Obviously, I’ve been at U.Va. for a long time. I was the longest serving [current] dean at U.Va. and lived on the Lawn. I know a lot of the people on Grounds but don’t know everybody, so I’ve just been doing a lot of listening. And part of building trust is building relationships, so it’s hard to know if you trust somebody or not if you don’t know them.

What I figured out is that everybody is united by their belief in the mission of U.Va. [and] their love for U.Va., and a lot of it is about channeling the love that people have for this institution and their belief in what we do.

In me, they have a strong advocate for academic freedom. I don’t like people telling me what my opinion is any more than you do. We support academic freedom. I support free speech, but I remind people that free speech does not mean that you’re free of criticism from other people.

So, actually, I’m optimistic. I feel like things are on a good path right now. I think it’s important for us to remember that a lot of people are just delivering on the mission every single day, and all they really want is just to have the opportunity to do that with no drama, right?

VB: UVA Health has seen some significant departures, as well as an ongoing lawsuit by its former CEO, who resigned in 2025. How is everything going now?

Beardsley: I think the health care system does a great job overall. The big picture is, a lot of people forget that, depending on how you count, it’s roughly two-thirds of U.Va. Mitch Rosner, the CEO there … we have a great relationship and very frequently spend a lot of time talking about the future. A lot of it is through … hiring great people every year, then working with him on some key hires. We’re always asking what we can do to take the health care system to the next level.

Right now, we’re looking to hire a new [medical school] dean. The prior dean was promoted to be basically the president of a university in Texas. The head of the U.Va. hospital was promoted to go to San Francisco for a big job there. So, they must have been doing something right. There are always lawsuits with health care systems, but I’m optimistic that we’re on a good path.

VB: Quarterly check-ins with the U.S. Department of Justice were required as part of U.Va.’s settlement last year. Are those still in effect?

Beardsley: Yes, we have an agreement … that was negotiated last year. Our approach to that is to comply and to provide quarterly reports. We just submitted a quarterly report this week, and we’re focused on complying with what we said we would do, which is basically abiding by the law.

VB: Have you had any conversations with Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights?

Beardsley: Personally, I have not. I know she came and visited a law school student group. Our lawyers do have interaction with her department, and the report that I submit does go to her area, and I’m sure she looks at it.

VB: How is everything going regarding federal funding? Has the university lost any significant federal grants since U.Va.’s federal research funding was threatened last year during the Justice Department’s civil rights investigation?

Beardsley: The landscape has changed a little bit, and I don’t know, I’ve not done a longitudinal study of changes in federal research funding over long periods of time. I do think it’s not uncommon for there to be new priorities over a period of time. So, for example, the government now seems to be quite interested in artificial intelligence, for example.

[That’s] why it’s important to abide by the law, because in order to qualify for federal funding, you need to meet certain criteria and standards, including obeying the law. At a high level, there have not been massive changes. There are always grants you’re competing for and some that are coming up for renewal, and the government is always free to adjust their priorities or their funding at any moment in time.

VB: How is construction and hiring proceeding for the Manning Institute for Biotechnology?

Beardsley: I would say fast and furious. Things are moving. From a business point of view, we’re quite excited about some of the industry that is moving [to Virginia, with] AstraZeneca [and] Eli Lilly making large investments.

When you have multinational leaders saying we should invest in Virginia and Charlottesville, we think that’s a good thing. And do we think that it would have happened without U.Va. signaling that biotech is important? I certainly know that it helped, for sure, because we’re committed to this area. It will attract a lot of talent here. There’s a lot of synergy with the engineering discipline and also with the health care system and the medical school.

U.Va At a glance

Founded
Sometimes called Mr. Jefferson’s University or just The University, the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. U.Va.’s first board of visitors included Jefferson and fellow U.S. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe.

Campus
With roughly 1,240 contiguous acres around its UNESCO World Heritage Site campus or “Grounds,” U.Va. is known for its distinctive Jefferson-designed Rotunda building located on the Lawn, the school’s 4.5-acre grass quad where graduations are held. U.Va.’s other major holding is the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, a four-year liberal arts college in Southwest Virginia.

2025-26 enrollment

• 17,848 undergraduate students
• 8,837 graduate students
• 5% international undergraduates
• 18% international graduate students
• 40% minority enrollment (undergraduate, graduate, professional)
• 67% in-state undergraduate students

Employees
Approximately 3,200 full-time faculty, 7,800 full-time staff and 12,800 UVA Health staff

Academic programs
Notable for its medicine, law and business schools, U.Va. offers more than 200 majors across 12 schools.

Tuition, fees, housing and dining
Includes average room and board, education and general fees, plus books, travel and personal expenses for general undergraduates.

• In-state residents: $40,313
• Out-of-state residents: $79,339

Sources: State Council of Higher Education for Virginia; University of Virginia