University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

Board Of Visitors:
The Clumsy Middle-Man

University students have decided
to re-write their code of conduct -
not mainly, I am assured, for the
usual reason that they disapproved
of its substance but because it was
"dictated" to them by the Board of
Visitors.

All of which raises, at least to
this observer, a fundamental
question about the board's worth.

Now everyone, I trust, will agree
that I am not a radical person and
at least some will say that I am not
mindless.

Those assertions in mind, I
would like to observe that the
Board, as now functioning, is at
best about a useful as the vice
presidency under Coolidge and at
worse as beneficent as a diseased
appendix.

The board, I suppose, is justified
most persuasively as the public
voice on the grounds.

Ludicrous

But that claim, it seems, is only
ludicrous. For the board is, of
course, not an unexpected body, but
one appointed by the governor,
And, once appointed, each Visitor
if for six years a representative not
of The Virginia public, but of
nobody really but himself.

Thus, if the Commonwealth
ought to have a voice and a vote in
University affairs - and, in a
state-owned university, clearly it
ought - then the Commonwealth,
the citizens of Virginia, would do
well to eliminate the clumsy
middle-man called the Board of
Visitors and put the University
under the governor and/or the state
education department, where
public control of the university can
be more immediate and direct.

The Board, of course, need not
be abolished. For it serves useful
purposes: It's advice may at times
be useful; it may be an easy forum
for the voices of alumni and others:
and, perhaps most important, it is a
place for the governor to put
people he wants to reward
especially well-endowed people
who have thrown a little this way.

Gelded

So the board perhaps should live
on - like all hallowed in situations.
It should merely be gelded.

For beyond its public role, does
the board have any other authority
to govern?

Can it, for example, claim
expertise?

Are its members professional
educators, scholars, public on
professional men whose learning
and opinions would profit the
state's educational enterprise?

On the other hand, are not some
of these qualities the very ones
which would mark the state's
educational officialdom?

Or, one might ask, does the
board have the expertise of
experience or proximity? Having
attended this university (albeit a
generation or so ago) it is able to
deliberate knowledgeable on its
problems? Having visited
Charlottesville (albeit not much
more than two or three times a
year) are they able to bolster their
decisions with first-hand
information gathered from in-depth
investigation?

All of which raises questions not
only of the Board's worth but that
of any group outside the university
community that would presume to
control it.

For clearly there are some
decisions which are and ought to be
a least partly public - such as major
decisions about university property
and its finances.

But all other decisions which
concern - and ought to interest - the
whole Commonwealth only slightly
- should not be public but made
only by those people whom they
concern the University community
and who have the expertise of both
profession and proximity to best
make them.

Which, let it be clear, is not
necessarily an argument for
"student power" or "students
rights" (whatever they are).

(It is, if anything, an argument
for greater faculty and
administration "power.")

But my major point is to
indicate that - as far as I can see -
the Board has no compelling reason
to exist (and, that things like
students codes of conducts are the
business neither of the Board nor of
any other outside the University).

Perhaps the Board has it defense
(and, candidly, this column is
meant more to raise questions than
to finally answer them).

But from here it does seem that
the emperor has no clothes.