"Being of two minds" seems an apt description of the current Board of Visitors at Virginia Tech. Starting last year, the Board has been making controversial decisions and then reversing itself - just to create a little more controversy. Affirmative action? In, then out, then in. Free speech? In, out, in. Gays? In, out, in, out, in.

To make this a little more understandable, here's a timeline of some Virginia Tech decisions of late:

April 2002: Karen DePauw is hired as new Dean of the Graduate School. Her partner, Dr. Shelli Fowler, is also hired as a tenure-track English professor, following the time-honored practice of hiring the significant other (if qualified) of a newly-hired dean.

June 2002: The Board of Visitors votes to cancel the contract offered to Fowler, citing budget concerns. The only problem is that there are 12 contracts up for approval - and only Fowler's is annulled. The gay community cries foul.

March 10, 2003: In a truly schizophrenic frenzy, the Board of Visitors:

· Votes to reverse itself and approve a contract for Dr. Fowler. However, it's only a one-year non-teaching contract.

· With no debate and in closed session, revises the school's non-discrimination policy by omitting "sexual orientation" from the list of those protected from discrimination in school hiring and admissions. Dyana Mason, Executive Director of Equality Virginia, declares, "By eliminating sexual orientation in such a back-handed way, the Board of Visitors sent a strong message that it was okay to discriminate against gay and lesbian faculty, staff, and students."

· Passes a speaker policy barring "persons or organizations [who] advocate or have participated in illegal acts of domestic violence and/or terrorism" from speaking on campus. Further, it mandates that all speakers at University events - and all group meetings - be approved by the President's office 30 days in advance. This policy was passed contingent upon review by the state Attorney General's office.

· And just to make sure they make the news - alters their hiring and admissions policy by prohibiting consideration of an applicant's "disability, age, veteran status, political affiliation, race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religious belief, or gender." This is being done, so says Rector John Rocovich, in response to an April 2002 memo from State Solicitor William Hurd advising that members of Boards of Visitors at the state's public universities could be personally liable for not changing their affirmative action policies. (A subsequent November memo from Hurd somewhat modified this stance.) The effect of this vote is to cancel all affirmative action programs and policies and Virginia Tech.

March 19: Solicitor Hurd advises Virginia Tech that "the new regulation [concerning speakers and meetings] violates fundamental rights to assembly and speech as protected by the First Amendment." This opinion from the Attorney General's Office effectively scuttles the vote on meetings and speakers made by the Board at its March 10 meeting. The opinion "is a relief to all proponents of higher education and believers in universities as bastions of free expression," says a Cavalier Daily editorial.

April 6: At a special meeting of the Board, called by school president Charles Steger, the Visitors vote to reverse themselves on both the deletion of affirmative action and the deletion of the sexual orientation non-discrimination clause. After carefully checking to make sure which direction this latest turnabout is taking them, gay and civil rights activists applaud. President Steger is given much of the credit. "Steger's support behind the scenes has always been solid for GLBT students and staff at Virginia Tech. His very strong statements in front of the board of visitors at Sunday's meeting are to be commended," says Human Rights Campaign organizer Bo Shuff. Others, however, boo. "[This sends] the message that this university cares less about being the best than about pandering to special rights groups," declares Sean Wohltman writing in the "Collegiate Times" student newspaper.

And on April 7, they rested.

Sports are big-time at Virginia Tech, and the Board of Visitors there is looking more and more like another sports team in a see-saw battle. Only this team seems to be fighting itself. And this apparently is not the see-sawing of factions, pulling the middle few in one direction or the other, like the Supreme Court. In fact most of their decisions appear to be unanimous. Yet another of the mysteries of Blacksburg. (It should be noted that while the Board vote canning affirmative action was unanimous, it was publicly criticized by Tech and Redskin football star Bruce Smith, who just happens to be a member of the Board. Hopefully, he was absent for that vote, or else he has raised cognitive dissonance to a new level.)

So what's going on here? Without possessing ESP or a psychiatric couch, it's hard to tell. Is this a case of a group of impulsive people who go out on this limb or that limb, only to be pulled back to terra firma by their more rational President Steger? There's certainly some merit to this argument, since each initial action - canceling Fowler's contract, removing sexual orientation for the non-discrimination policy, and voiding affirmative action programs - has produced significant outcry from students, faculty, the public, and, in most cases, Steger himself. But boards of visitors seldom act without a good deal of advance groundwork. And Steger doesn't have a vote on the Board.

Perhaps a better explanation is this: Appointments to higher education boards are becoming more and more a Governor's political exercise of rewarding your big financial supporters and ensuring your appointees reflect your ideology. This, in turn, leads those Board members to be more beholden to the wishes - explicit or perceived - of political leaders in Richmond. Add to this the Commonwealth's current financial situation and the suffering budgets of institutions of higher education and it looks like a perfect recipe for board members to adopt an "anything-to-make-you- folks-in-Richmond-happy" mindset.

In the past few days, another case supporting this explanation has cropped up. The Board at James Madison University received a memo from that wild and wacky Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) expressing his dislike for the "morning after" emergency contraception pill. And in no time flat, the JMU Board voted 7-6 to remove the pill from the University's pharmacy. Mad-Board disease seems to be creeping up the Blue Ridge. As the Cavalier Daily recently editorialized, "That Boards across Virginia have been capitulating to the political demands of Virginia politicians is very problematic."

Was external political pressure the cause of the Board votes at Tech? It seems to provide only a partial explanation. The letter from Attorney General Kilgore's office was certainly the excuse used by Board members for voting out affirmative action. But the anti-free speech action was probably not prompted by Richmond, since Kilgore's right-hand man, Bill Hurd, promptly declared it unconstitutional. And the votes on gay issues were sufficiently at cross-purposes to suggest that they weren't following anyone's planned agenda.

What does seem apparent is a growing willingness of boards of visitors to dive in to the dark pond of social controversy without taking the pulse of the public, the faculty and the students. And at Tech, they've come up looking awfully muddy.

- Jim Heilman, April 24, 2003