Six months after UVA Student Council’s executive board called for the immediate resignation of Bert Ellis, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first four appointees to the UVA Board of Visitors, the controversy has reached the Virginia General Assembly.
On January 31, a resolution brought forth by state Sen. Creigh Deeds to remove Ellis’ name from the final list of appointees passed the senate’s Democrat-led Elections and Privileges Committee. A vote to adopt the resolution by the full senate was pending at C-VILLE press time.
“I have real concerns about a 60-year-old man who’d travel to UVA with a razor blade to remove a sign from a student’s door,” Deeds said in an interview on WINA referencing a 2020 event that was widely publicized after Ellis’ appointment was announced. At that time, however, Deeds also noted that if Ellis were removed from the BOV, Youngkin’s next appointee might also be controversial or unacceptable to some.
In a February 3 statement released after the senate committee voted to adopt Deeds’ resolution, the student council executive board expressed optimism that Ellis would be removed.
“We hope our elected officials recognize that Mr. Ellis’ conduct is not fitting of someone possessing the responsibility and powers of those serving on our Board of Visitors. Our community is paying close attention to Richmond right now,” the statement reads.
Ellis’ appointment has divided UVA faculty.
UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan applauded the push to remove Ellis from the BOV and called him an “active enemy” of UVA, despite being an alum.
“Mr. Ellis is clearly hostile to the University of Virginia,” Vaidhyanathan said after the committee vote. “I mean, he has shown for years that he does not respect students. He doesn’t respect them for having independent minds. He doesn’t respect them for wanting to pursue intellectual pursuits that they decide they want to pursue. He doesn’t respect their freedom of speech. … So the idea of him actually serving as some sort of custodian for the university is kind of absurd.”
UVA Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, however, wrote a letter to the General Assembly in support of Ellis.
“Bert and I have different political takes on quite a few subjects, but I know Bert to be loyal to the university and dedicated to its best interests,” Sabato wrote in an email, according to the Virginia Mercury. “He’s proven as much many times.”
The controversy over Ellis began building in the weeks after his name was announced by the Youngkin administration on July 1. The Cavalier Daily published a series of articles and op-eds last summer describing an episode between Ellis and a Lawn resident, a minority student whose door was covered with signs of protest against the university’s racist history. According to the paper’s reporting and his own essay, Ellis, a South Carolina businessman and member of the conservative-leaning Jefferson Council alumnae group, said he hoped to remove the portion of the sign that included an obscenity. He was stopped by two UVA ambassadors.
“I was prepared to use a small razor blade to remove the Fuck UVA part of this sign and they said I could not do that as it would be considered malicious damage to the University and a violation of this student’s First Amendment Rights and they were prepared to restrain me from so doing,” Ellis wrote on Bacon’s Rebellion, a libertarian blog founded by Ellis’ fellow Jefferson Council member Jim Bacon.
Soon after that incident became public, The Cavalier Daily published a lengthy investigative piece detailing Ellis’ role as a UVA undergrad in inviting well-known eugenicist William Shockley to Grounds for a debate during the 1974-75 school year titled “The Correlation Between Race and Intelligence.” At the time, Ellis was one of three chairs of a student-led events planning organization called University Union. Despite repeated vocal opposition to the event from Black student groups and a vote to cancel it by UVA Student Council, the Union held the event.
“Shockley is an insult to our intelligence,” University Union Minority Culture Committee Co-Chair Sheila Crider said at the time, according to The Cavalier Daily. “And as a representative of the Black community, I expressed my opinion that we didn’t want to see Shockley here.”
Bacon says Ellis has been unfairly portrayed, including The Cavalier Daily’s representation of the Shockley debate.
“The point was, by promoting free speech the student union advanced the cause of anti-racism,” Bacon said.
He described Ellis as “a proponent of free speech, diversity of thought, and upholding the Jeffersonian tradition. So all these [things have gone] totally unacknowledged and unrepresented in the debate. And I just think that’s just outrageous.”
Attempts to frame the Shockley event as a healthy debate, however, appalls Vaidhyanathan.
“The pursuit of knowledge at the university is a very, very busy and advanced process, and we don’t have time to step back two centuries and take something seriously like eugenics,” Vaidhyanathan says.
Ellis declined an interview request from C-VILLE Weekly, but said he would speak publicly after the state Senate’s final vote on the resolution to remove him.
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. Full interviews with Siva Vaidhyanathan and Jim Bacon are at wina.com.