(Ezekiel Loseke, Headline USA) Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, appointed an anti-woke alumnus who founded an organization to combat the University of Virginia’s anti-American ideas, to the school’s Board of Visitors.
The new appointee, Bert Ellis, was deemed controversial by the school’s leftist gatekeepers, according to a hit piece published Sunday in the New York Times.
Ellis has gifted the University of Virginia more than $10 million, holds two degrees from the university and he owns a campus-adjacent institution called The Spot.
He also, however, opposes the university’s heavy funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, especially when they attack the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson.
Ellis has done more than complain about the wayward drift of the university.
In 2020, a female student expressed her radical racial leftist politics with a sign that included the phrasing “KKKops” and directed an expletive at the university. The sign was visible on the school’s historic Lawn, a part of the school grounds that was designed by Jefferson himself, overlooking the its iconic Rotunda.
Ellis requested that the school take down the sign. When they refused, he knocked on the young woman’s door himself but was asked to leave, and left without incident.
“I decided that, shoot, if the university wasn’t going to take it down, I’d take it down,” Ellis said.
U.Va.’s faculty senate censured Ellis over the incident.
The incident also inspired the creation of the Jefferson Council, of which Ellis is a co-founder.
The nonprofit group lists several goals, according to its website:
- Promote an academic environment based on open dialogue throughout the University.
- Preserve the Jefferson Legacy.
- Preserve the appearance of the Lawn as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
- Support and reinvigorate the Honor System.
When Youngkin was elected governor in 2021, he made a pledge to overhaul the education system of Virginia, and Ellis wrote that this was the council’s chance to establish its goals.
“This is our only opportunity to change/reverse the path to Wokeness that has overtaken our entire university,” he wrote in a post for the Jefferson Council.
Ellis appears to have been correct about Youngkin. On his first day in office he signed Executive Order No. 1, which banned the teaching of what he called “inherently divisive concepts,” including critical race theory, in public schools.
Youngkin also asked the founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Dr. Edward J. Feulner, to screen new members for the state university boards, which yielded the nomination of Ellis.
As should be expected, the woke DEI regime struck back at Ellis, digging into his past and attempting to cancel him.
Youngkin’s intervention at the University of Virginia is part of a growing trend of conservative governors fighting to retake their state’s universities, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s takeover of the New College of Florida.
