Yet another Republican governor appears eager to make his mark on public higher education. Faculty fear George Mason University is the next target.
Beginning this week, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia’s appointees will make up a supermajority on George Mason’s Board of Visitors. Among them are numerous researchers and activists with ties to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. One board member is a lead author of Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration that many critics have called authoritarian.
At a meeting on Friday, George Mason’s new board is expected to elect a chair, called a rector in the state’s Jeffersonian jargon. Eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion is the primary force driving conversations about who should lead the board, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions.
Youngkin, a private-equity executive, became Virginia’s governor in 2022 after promising to ban critical race theory at Virginia’s K-12 schools, capitalizing on culture-war debates over what should be taught in elementary- and secondary-school classrooms.
More recently, Republican politicians have turned their attention to higher education, enacting sweeping new state laws and taking executive actions that target diversity offices, diversity training, and teaching about race and gender. Some faculty members worry that Youngkin now wants to join the fray.
Youngkin has been explicit about his intentions. At an orientation for his board picks in 2022, the governor told appointees he needed to dispel “this myth that board members are cheerleaders for the university” and instead should be “a responsible extension of the executive branch.”
Bethany Letiecq, a professor in George Mason’s College of Education and Human Development and chair of the state AAUP conference, said her campus appears “incredibly vulnerable as a test case for what Project 2025 could look like on campus.”
“My feeling is, we’ve been captured,” she added.
In some ways, George Mason appears an obvious choice: Its law school, named for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has close ties with Washington’s conservative legal movement. Record-breaking gifts from the right-leaning Charles Koch Foundation have created new professorships in free-market economics.
But in other ways, the anti-DEI movement is at odds with a university like George Mason. The student body is the most diverse in Virginia. Administrators have boasted that intentional inclusion efforts support that diversity and help prevent achievement gaps.
That disconnect has turned into conflict as the board’s conservative coalition has grown. Over the past year, faculty members have been feuding with the board over attempts to be more involved in tenure and curriculum decisions.
Once the board’s new members and new chair are seated on Friday, “all the ingredients” appear to be in place for real change, said Letiecq.
“We’ve had a strong sense as faculty that once the board shifted to 12-4, the gloves would come off,” she said, referring to the supermajority of Youngkin appointees.
Board Shifts
There’s a common thread in Youngkin’s picks for George Mason’s board: ties to the Heritage Foundation. The chair of his advisory committee on higher-education board appointments is the organization’s founder.
Another common thread appears to be opposition to colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs, which aim to promote more welcoming campuses for students and staff from diverse backgrounds. DEI efforts have come under fire by Republicans in over two-dozen states.
In anticipation of a potential Trump victory this fall, Heritage has released Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document laying out an expansion of executive power in a hypothetical second term. The lead author of Project 2025’s education chapter is on George Mason’s board: Lindsey Burke, appointed by Youngkin last year.
The chapter proposes banning diversity efforts, “woke gender ideology,” and critical race theory in higher ed; changing federal rules to say that gender is “sex defined at birth”; and eliminating the entire U.S. Education Department.
In addition to Burke, Youngkin’s George Mason appointments have included:
- Nina Rees, a national charter schools advocate who previously served as Heritage’s senior education policy analyst and spokesperson.
- Armand Alacbay, who co-authored a 2023 Heritage report on “dismantling the higher education accreditation cartel.”
- Kenneth Marcus, a former assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department who in 2021 signed onto Heritage’s call to “end critical race theory influence in schools.”
- Marc Short, a senior Trump administration staffer who in 2017 was reportedly a finalist for Heritage’s presidency.
- Charles (Cully) Stimson, a former Pentagon official who resigned over controversial remarks about Guantanamo Bay and now serves as a senior adviser to Heritage’s president.
- Robert Pence, a Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador who isn’t connected to Heritage, but has colorfully criticized DEI initiatives at recent George Mason board meetings.
One Youngkin appointee appears to have a more nuanced stance on DEI: Michael Meese, a brigadier general and accomplished academic who now runs a nonprofit group that supports veterans.
Though Meese has conservative credentials — he led the transition team for Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs — he also was part of a recent George Mason committee tasked with evaluating a DEI course requirement. The group expressed support for diversity efforts in its final report.
Bob Witeck, the other board representative on the committee, said in an interview that he and Meese are “politically polar opposites” but enjoyed working together on the issue.
“We were very proud of [the final report],” he said. “We thought it was intelligent and nonpolitical.”
Meese was long presumed to be the board’s next rector, or chair, but his moderate position on DEI may have derailed his candidacy, according to Witeck and two other people familiar with the board’s dynamics. They said they were told that Youngkin and his staff have been contacting board members and urging them to instead vote for Stimson, the senior adviser at Heritage.
Potential gubernatorial involvement is new to Witeck, who joined the board in 2016 and whose term expired July 1; board members can’t serve more than two consecutive four-year terms. Witeck said he doesn’t recall either of Youngkin’s predecessors getting involved in board matters and that discussions were “never politicized.”
Youngkin’s office declined to answer written questions from The Chronicle, saying in a brief emailed statement that selecting a new rector is up to the board. Youngkin, the statement said, will continue to “denounce a divisive social agenda that separates people rather than bring them together.” Stimson declined a request for an interview, saying it would be “presumptuous.” Meese also declined.
Faculty Feuds
The new board will inherit two clashes with outspoken members of George Mason’s faculty: debates about the board’s involvement in tenure decisions, and a proposed curricular requirement on diversity and inclusion.
Letiecq, the Virginia AAUP leader, believes that conservative board members have been “field-testing their strategy” on contentious issues before they’ve had a majority. “Now they can really run their game.”
Before its February meeting, the board requested the complete CVs and written justifications for promotion of all professors recommended for mid-year tenure approval, according to comments made by Kenneth Walsh, the interim provost, at the meeting. Normally, the board only got a table summarizing the administration’s recommendations for tenure, Walsh said.
The lengthy page count of those files — covering only two professors — “was just too much” for the board to review, Walsh said. Assembling a similar packet for the end-of-year tenure recommendations, then estimated to include about 70 faculty, wasn’t feasible, he said.
Jeffrey Rosen, a Youngkin board appointee, then suggested the board be given links to the CVs and all published papers by candidates, allowing them to choose what to review. “It’s obviously optional whether to look at it or not,” he said at the meeting.
That upset some faculty members, who wrote a petition demanding the board not review full-tenure documents. They feared the board members would try to block certain professors’ tenure for political reasons, said Letiecq, who circulated the petition. “There was a lot of concern among those doing critical scholarship work regarding populations of color and LGBTQ families,” Letiecq said.
Also at issue are the board’s attempts to block new DEI courses.
George Mason planned to require all students to take two classes with a “Just Societies” designation starting this fall. The courses would incorporate concepts of justice and equity into material within a student’s discipline. The administration has argued that the curricular change is a necessary mandate that will meet accreditors’ DEI standards and prepare students for civic life. Critics, including some current board members, have said the courses will impose left-leaning ideologies on students and silence conservative voices.
Burke, the board member who contributed to Project 2025, sought a meeting with administrators to discuss the courses in January, according to emails obtained by The Chronicle. Days later, the university sent the course’s syllabi to the governor’s office, other emails show. At the time, a Youngkin spokesperson told The Chronicle his office sought the syllabi after they “heard concerns” about courses from board members.
In the faculty petition, professors call the board’s attempts to derail the Just Societies requirement “a massive overreach and a clear violation of AAUP principles which put curricular decisions squarely in faculty hands.”
“Students want to learn from us,” said Tim Gibson, a communication professor. “They don’t want random people appointed to a board with no expertise making decisions about the curriculum.”
Over 300 people have signed the petition, though not all faculty feel represented by it. The Just Societies courses are “nothing but pure political propaganda,” said Timothy Groseclose, an economics professor. The board’s scrutiny “is performing a useful service and making the campus less political,” he added.
After a heated meeting in May, George Mason decided to table the curricular requirement. Walsh, the interim provost, said the university would revisit the issue later in hopes of starting the courses in 2025. Some faculty members believe the punt was a fatal blow, with the board only becoming more conservative over time.
In one recent case, though, George Mason’s administration — led by Gregory Washington, its first Black president — did push back against conservative criticism.
In September, Heritage released a report outlining what it called “dangerous DEI bloat at Virginia’s public universities,” arguing that “DEI staffs are wasteful” and work only to “promote radical ideologies.” The report singled out George Mason, alleging that the number of DEI staff was proportionally the “highest of any public university in the country.”
The next day, Washington posted an open letter defending DEI work and arguing that Heritage had used an “odd and erroneous methodology” to twist numbers to support its conclusion. Heritage quickly responded with a statement saying its researchers had “provided the receipts.” Washington countered with another letter citing university data that “confirmed our initial doubts about the basic accuracy, and therefore validity, of the report.”
“This report — sloppy, methodologically questionable, and simply inaccurate as it is — not only falls short of something we can take seriously, it does damage to our capacity to have such a serious conversation,” he wrote.
Washington then invited the Heritage researchers to meet with him on campus, hoping to “begin a serious dialogue about this report and the larger issues that underlie it,” he wrote. A meeting never occurred, a university spokesperson told The Chronicle.
Political Context
The vast majority of public university boards are filled by gubernatorial appointments. As Republican governors have sought to limit higher education’s autonomy and curb what they see as rampant liberal indoctrination, these appointments have become a useful tool.
The most deliberate campaign may be that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has used board appointments to reshape the state’s public liberal arts college, New College of Florida. Several of DeSantis’s allies also hold leadership roles or are involved in selecting future leaders at other public colleges.
Gibson, the George Mason communication professor, has closely watched developments in Florida, as he believes they are an indicator of what’s to come on his campus. “Florida is sort of two to three years ahead of Virginia, I think,” he said.
On the other hand, George Mason’s history suggests the panic could be overblown, said Daniele Struppa, who was George Mason’s dean of arts and sciences from 1997 to 2006.
At the time, Struppa said, the board was led by another Heritage-affiliated conservative coalition: Edwin Feulner, the think tank’s founder, and Edwin Meese III, then a “Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow.”
That era has striking ties to the current board: Feulner is now chair of the Virginia Commission on Higher Education Board Appointments. Meese is the father of Michael Meese, the current board member who served on the DEI committee.
During their tenure at George Mason, Struppa said, there was similar panic among the faculty about political interference in curriculum and tenure, said Struppa, who is now the president of Chapman University, in California. But it turned out to be “a lot of worry for no good reason,” he said, as the conservative board members “didn’t ever do anything that seemed objectionable.”
Struppa said he believes the new wave of faculty anxiety could dissipate as long as board members “don’t tell anybody what to teach in class.”
“I hope the apprehension is disproportionate,” he said.
But Witeck, the former board member, said he believes this Heritage-heavy board is far more eager to enact change.
Starting in 2022, when Youngkin’s first appointees joined the board, discussions of forceful or political actions would often end the same way, Witeck said: “An appointee would say, ‘Well, in two years or three years, we’ll be the majority.’”
The conservatives would be outvoted or their issues would be tabled, he said, “but there was some sense of patience on their part.”
“It was always, ‘Our time will come,’” he said.
Emma Pettit contributed reporting to this story.
