On June 27, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced four new appointments to the University of Virginia’s governing Board of Visitors. Should his latest nominees receive approval from the General Assembly, the Republican governor will have appointed all members of the 17-person body.
The board is responsible for the school’s long-term planning, budgets, policies and, most pertinent today, selecting the president of the university — a post that will soon be vacant.
Under pressure from the Trump administration Department of Justice, Jim Ryan tendered his resignation as ninth president of the state’s flagship university on the same day Youngkin announced his new board appointments. The DOJ had accused Ryan of slow-walking the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the university, despite direct orders from the Board of Visitors and the White House to do so. Outgoing Rector Robert Hardie, whose term concluded on Monday, accepted his resignation the same day with “profound sadness.”
On Monday, Hardie and incoming Rector Rachel Sheridan announced UVa Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis will assume the role of acting president once Ryan is officially out of office and until an interim president can be found. On Wednesday, it was announced Ryan will officially depart the presidential residence at Carr’s Hill on July 11.
A nationwide search for the university’s 10th president is expected to take place at the direction of the board, which is now entirely composed of Youngkin appointees. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli remains among that number despite a state Senate panel’s party-line vote blocking his confirmation and a lawsuit filed by Democrats to prevent him from remaining on the board.
The governor’s recent four appointments include:
Jim Donovan
Jim Donovan is a resident of Upperville and a longtime partner at New York-based Goldman Sachs, the world’s second-largest investment bank by revenue. Since starting out at Goldman Sachs in 1993, Donovan has ascended the ranks to reach the status of vice chairman and been involved in investment management and corporate strategy.
He got a taste of politics during President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. Trump selected Donovan to sit on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which is intended to serve as a nonpartisan, independent “source of advice” on intelligence issues facing the country and “the vigor and insight with which the [intelligence] community plans for the future.”
He still maintains strong ties to the political world, namely through his engagement to Hope Hicks. Hicks also served under the first Trump administration as communications director, from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021, after working as a public relations executive and press secretary for the Trump Organization since 2014.
It was during this in-between period that she was called to testify before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee given her name appeared 183 times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump lauded his former aide for refusing to answer any of the committee’s 155 questions regarding her time in the White House.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Donovan earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering as well as a Master of Business Administration. He later obtained a law degree from Harvard University Law School, which he now uses as an adjunct professor at the UVa School of Law. He joined the faculty in 2009 and also sits on the board of the Karsh Institute of Democracy. Previously, he has been a board member for the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Donovan has never donated to Youngkin. Over the years, he has contributed a total of $138,000 to various Republican campaigns, including $95,000 to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential run.
John Harris
John Harris is a Charlottesville resident who has spent his career with private equity enterprises operating on a global level. He graduated from UVa’s McIntire School of Commerce in 1982 before taking a job at global accounting firm Arthur Andersen. He went on to become vice president at Golub Capital, a lender and private credit asset management business.
In 1997, Harris joined the Carlyle Group — a Washington D.C.-based investment firm founded by David Rubenstein, William Conway Jr. and Daniel D’Anellio that manages more than $450 billion in assets — as a managing director and, eventually, chief financial officer. The Carlyle Group is among one of the world’s leading private equity firms and where Youngkin served as co-CEO before running for office.
In his roles there, Harris oversaw the company’s finances, investor reporting, limited partner negotiations as well as all matters relating to human resources, information technology and legal compliance.
Though he left the firm in 2010, Harris has remained entrenched in private equity. He’s since provided his expertise as a board member and private investor for a number of organizations including WorldStrides, an educational travel company headquartered in Charlottesville; NanoTouch Materials, a self-cleaning product manufacturer out of Forest; and Locus Health, a virtual health care platform based in Albemarle County.
He’s also been involved with the Boys & Girls Club of Central Virginia, the UVa Alumni Association and the Jefferson Trust, the alumni association’s trust fund. He currently sits on the advisory board of the Virginia Film Festival and even produced his own documentary, “1186 to Omaha,” highlighting the Wahoos baseball teams’ win in the 2015 College World Series.
Harris is a major financial backer of Youngkin, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. When Youngkin was running for governor in 2021, Harris donated a total of $13,500 to his gubernatorial campaign. Once the Republican secured the Executive Mansion in Richmond, Harris contributed another $50,000. Over the past three years, he’s donated $80,000 to the Spirit of Virginia, a political action committee associated with Youngkin.
Gene Lockhart
Eugene Lockhart is a fellow UVa alumnus and a private investor currently residing in Palm Beach, Florida. His resume includes serving as the chief executive of several major investment banks, namely MasterCard International, BankAmerica Corporation’s Global Retail Bank and HSBC UK, formerly known as Midland Bank.
Since 2006, he’s served on the board of Huron Consulting Group, a global management consultant out of Chicago. Lockhart established his own venture capital firm, MissionOG, in 2014, which primarily focuses on the financial services and payment industry. He continues to function as the company’s chairman emeritus and general partner. More recently, in July 2020, he was brought on as senior adviser for the Blackstone Group, considered the world’s largest asset management firm with $1 trillion in assets.
Despite dedicating the entirety of his career to finance management, Lockhart studied thermodynamics at UVa’s School of Engineering before obtaining his Master in Business Administration from the university’s Darden School of Business.
He has stayed involved with his alma mater, having served as chair of the Darden School Foundation as well as a member of the UVa Alumni Board of Managers and Engineering School Foundation. Some of the other higher education and philanthropic groups he’s been a part of include: the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education, the Manhattanville College Board of Trustees, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Boy Scouts of America.
Lockhart and his wife Terry, who is a UVa alumna, established the Lockhart Family Head Men’s Tennis Coach Endowed Fund this past April. The gift creates an endowment to fund all of the men’s tennis program’s annual expenses in perpetuity.
Calvert Moore
Calvert Saunders Moore of Locust Valley, New York, is the president of Ivor & Co., a family investment company previously led by her father, Thomas Saunders III, an alumnus of UVa’s Darden School who also served on the UVa Board of Visitors.
A former partner at Morgan Stanley in New York City and a Wall Street tycoon, Saunders was part of the group that spearheaded the movement to form the UVa Investment Management Company in the early 2000s. His hand, and wallet, also played a key role in the creation of UVa’s first-ever endowed university professorships, expanding the Darden School’s campus and the 1995 capital campaign which raised $1 billion. Both of Moore’s parents received the National Humanities Medal in recognition for their contributions to higher education in 2008 from then-President George W. Bush.
Moore followed in her father’s footsteps and attended UVa, graduating with a history degree in 1990. She headed the Building & Grounds Committee for the College of Arts & Sciences during the South Lawn Project, a $100 million endeavor to expand the university’s historic Lawn in order to accommodate the expanding needs of the college.
She’s served on the boards of the Museum of the City of New York and the Chapin School, a prominent, all-girls private school in New York that Moore attended. She also serves as a trustee for the Boys’ Club of New York and the American Civil War Museum.
If approved, Youngkin’s latest batch of appointees will fill the seats formerly held by: Hardie, a Charlottesville-based hotelier; Vice Rector Carlos Brown, a Richmond resident and an executive vice president at Virginia’s largest public utility, Dominion Energy; Robert Blue, president and CEO of Dominion Energy; and L.F. Payne, a Virginia Democrat who represented Virginia’s 5th Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1988 to 1997.
Members serve four-year terms and can be reappointed for one additional term. The next Board of Visitors meeting is currently scheduled for Sept. 11.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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