U.Va. continues presidential search, despite Spanberger’s call for pause

The University of Virginia’s presidential search committee has continued its work in hiring a successor for former President Jim Ryan, despite calls from Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger and groups of faculty and staff to pause the process.

In a Nov. 21 statement, the U.Va. Board of Visitors‘ special committee — a body that includes U.Va. board members and others with ties to the state’s flagship university — said that it had “just completed the first round of interviews” with candidates for the presidency last week. “However, we are not yet at the point of selecting finalists. To responsibly narrow this exceptional pool, we must conduct additional due diligence, hold further interviews and continue our internal deliberations.”

The committee’s unsigned statement does not provide a timeline for further interviews or clarify whether they are now taking the pause Spanberger requested in a Nov. 12 letter to U.Va. Rector Rachel Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson, or moving full speed ahead.

U.Va.’s Faculty Senate also called for Sheridan and Wilkinson to immediately resign from the board in a Nov. 14 resolution released the same day that Ryan wrote a bombshell 12-page letter to the Faculty Senate that was then made public. In the days before his late June resignation, Ryan wrote that Sheridan, Wilkinson and board member Paul Manning exerted pressure on Ryan to resign the presidency by asserting that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice required him to step down for the university to reach a resolution of alleged civil rights violations.

However, Ryan wrote, the three board members may have misrepresented the DOJ’s orders, adding that the true pressure for him to resign might have originated with Gov. Glenn Youngkin, board members and conservative attorneys hired by the board, or a combination of those individuals. Ryan also alleged that Manning, along with Sheridan and Wilkinson, who were not yet serving as rector and vice rector, failed to keep the rest of the board of visitors informed of their negotiations with Justice Department attorneys and prevented Ryan from directly speaking with them.

Spanberger, who previously asked Sheridan and Wilkinson to hold off hiring or deciding presidential finalists until she could fill five vacant board seats as governor, has ramped up her own criticism of Youngkin and the board following Ryan’s letter.

The governor-elect accused Youngkin of “overstepping” by naming politically motivated board members and seeking to influence universities via those appointments in an interview last week with The Washington Post, and she said naming appointees to the five U.Va. board vacancies will be a day one priority when she takes office in January 2026.

Meanwhile, the United Campus Workers of Virginia, a local chapter of the Communications Workers of America, and hundreds of current and retired faculty members have backed the U.Va. Faculty Senate resolution calling for a pause in the hiring process as well as Sheridan and Wilkinson’s resignations.

However, as of Monday, the rector and vice rector had not yet responded to the Nov. 14 resolution, U.Va. Faculty Senate Chair Jeri Seidman wrote in an email to fellow faculty senators, and on Tuesday, a U.Va. spokesperson said that the university did not have a comment beyond Sheridan’s previous letter to the Faculty Senate — which Ryan called “inaccurate” in his letter — and the search committee’s Nov. 21 report on its recent candidate interviews.

Meanwhile, U.Va.’s presidential search might be completed before Spanberger takes office.

Seidman, an associate professor of commerce, wrote that she’s received mixed responses from faculty members. Some say they’re “reassured” by the committee’s statement that it has not yet selected finalists, but others are “unsure if a pause has even occurred. … Whichever way you interpret it, I’m sure we will all continue to watch the search with intense interest.”