The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors unanimously selected Darden School of Business Dean Scott Beardsley to succeed Jim Ryan as UVA’s 10th president during a closed-door meeting on Friday Dec. 19, despite facing numerous votes of no confidence and calls to stop the search until Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger is inaugurated on Jan. 14, 2026.
Beardsley, who joined the University as dean of the Darden School in 2015, will assume the role on Jan. 1, 2026. Prior to joining Darden, Beardsley was a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
“I am committed to excellence and bringing a results-driven and student-centered approach to promote the University’s academic excellence, faculty strength, exceptional patient care, financial sustainability, public service mission, and impact for the long term,” Beardsley is quoted as saying in a Dec. 19 article for UVAToday.
UVA Spokesperson Brian Coy wrote in the article that Beardsley is the “right leader” for a “complex time in higher education.”
Many groups in the UVA community and beyond objected to the appointment.
“The rushed appointment of Scott Beardsley as University of Virginia president by UVA’s Board of Visitors today, with little meaningful faculty input, is an affront to the entire UVA community in a time of crisis,” Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said in a statement shortly after Beardsley’s appointment. “This undermines the legitimacy of today’s appointment that will continue to be challenged in the coming months.”
Rector Rachel Sheridan told UVA Today that Beardsley was selected “after careful deliberation and close consultation with the UVA community and stakeholders throughout the process, including faculty, staff, students, alumni and parents.” She added that the Board has been “committed to an inclusive, transparent and thoughtful” search process since the beginning.
Friday’s meeting only lasted a handful of seconds before Sheridan announced the Board was moving into closed session to discuss and consider presidential candidates.
The announcement resulted in vocal disapproval from members of the public who had just been let into the room to attend the meeting. Many of them were members of UVA’s faculty and staff and had been protesting outside the meeting before it began, calling for greater transparency from the Board and a pause to the search.
Ahead of the meeting on Friday, UVA Professor Susan Fraiman said she was disappointed that the Board had decided to move ahead with its search despite multiple votes of no confidence in the body and its leadership.
“I’m scared. I’m fed up. I’m determined,” she said. “The fact that the BOV can just blithely proceed after all of these expressions of no confidence is quite astonishing.”
Fraiman called the Board’s decision to move ahead with selecting a president “rushed” and “politically motivated.”
UVA Professor Victoria Baena agreed with Fraiman, saying she was disappointed that the search had moved forward despite the vast majority of UVA’s constituency asking for its suspension until all seats on the Board have been filled.
“It’s really shameful that they’ve decided to set this vote on a day after when most students have left for the holiday, when they’re hoping to kind of push it through, or to sneak it through,” she said. “I think they’re hoping that people will not pay attention.”
UVA’s Student Council had released a statement calling for the suspension of the presidential search just a couple of hours before the Board announced Beardsley’s appointment.
The BOV “is neglecting the damage a rushed presidential selection will do to Our University,” the statement, which was addressed to the Board, said. “We fear that at its current pace, an appointment is motivated by partisan interests, and not those of the university and its student body.”
Critics say BOV ‘ignored calls from every corner of the Commonwealth’
On Nov. 12, Spanberger sent a letter to Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson, stating that the Board’s actions “have severely undermined the public’s and the University community’s confidence in the Board’s ability to govern productively, transparently, and in the best interests of the University.”
She asked the Board not to name a new president until she has appointed — and the General Assembly has confirmed — five new members so that the Board is in compliance with Virginia law, which requires the Board to have 17 members, including at least 12 Virginia residents and 12 UVA alumni. (There are currently 12 Board members, including 9 Virginia residents and 9 UVA alumni.) Spanberger added that she will make her appointments soon after her inauguration.
Two days later, UVA’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution echoing Spanberger’s request to pause the search until all Board seats are filled. The resolution also called for Sheridan’s and Wilkinson’s resignation.
But on Nov. 21, the 28-person Special Committee on the Nomination of a President — established by the Board in late July to help select Jim Ryan’s replacement — said it would move ahead.
In response, nine of UVA’s 14 academic deans wrote a letter to the Board on Dec. 1, citing low confidence in its leadership and again asking them to pause the search. On Dec. 12, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution stating that anyone chosen as UVA’s 10th president by the current Board will assume the role with no confidence from the Senate.
Del. Katrina Callsen, who also attended the Dec. 19 BOV meeting, agreed with faculty members that the search process has been “illegitimate,” and said she and some of her colleagues plan to respond in the legislature.
“The current BOV has deliberately and continuously ignored calls from every corner of the Commonwealth,” Callsen told Charlottesville Tomorrow. “They have ignored what Abigail Spanberger has asked them to do, they’ve ignored the General Assembly — the very people who confirmed them — and they continue to act despite there being legal challenges. And not only that, they’ve ignored the very people that make UVA great, the workers, the staff, the alumni and the students,” she said. “It’s politicizing the governance of our public universities in a way that’s inappropriate.”
Callson added that she and her colleagues in the legislature are “not without the capability to act.
“We’re going to be in session in just a few weeks time,” she said. “I know that myself and many other colleagues are working on legislation that will make it so that this cannot happen again.”
