(The Center Square) – An education defense group is calling for clear lines of authority to be codified after text messages between a University of Virginia faculty member and the school’s Student Council president were disclosed, revealing the student was seemingly a “vehicle” for the faculty member’s “agenda.”
Director of higher education initiatives at Defending Education Reagan Dugan told The Center Square that University of Virginia (UVA) students “believed their student government was speaking for them.”
“Instead, their elected president was functioning as a vehicle for a faculty member’s political agenda,” Dugan said.
"UVA’s Faculty Senate exists to advise leadership and oversee academic matters,” Dugan said. “It has no charter to run political operations against the board it serves.”
“Yet, these texts show its elected leader secretly scripted student statements, coordinated rallies, and seeded anonymous social media campaigns to undermine the very board she now sits on,” Dugan said.
Dugan refers to the text messages revealed by a FOIA request that show communications between UVA professor and head of the Faculty Senate Jeri Seidman and then-UVA Student Council President Clay Dickerson.
Rather than showing “two University leaders exchanging ideas in good faith,” the text messages reveal “a faculty member methodically cultivating a student leader, scripting his public statements, directing his organization's actions, manipulating his messaging, and using him as a vehicle to move public opinion,” the Jefferson Council said in a release.
This all transpired while “the Faculty Senate was publicly and simultaneously demanding transparency from the same administration they were privately working to undermine,” the Jefferson Council said.
The Jefferson Council is a group of UVA alumni, faculty, donors, and students who “are committed to preserving a legacy of freedom and excellence at Mr. Jefferson’s university.”
Dugan told The Center Square that “faculty senators like to call” exchanges such as what happened between Seidman and Dickerson “‘shared governance.’”
“These texts show what it actually looks like in practice,” Dugan said, stating that is why “we need clearer statutory lines between faculty advisory roles and university governance."
“State legislatures and boards need to codify clear lines of authority,” Dugan urged.
“The fact that this elected faculty leader [Seidman] now sits on the very board she spent eight months working to delegitimize should prompt serious questions about whether that reform is overdue,” Dugan said.
When asked what her response is to those who say she cultivated Dickerson to push public opinion the way she wanted, Seidman told the Center Square: “These statements significantly underestimate Clay.”
“He is the elected leader of approximately 17,000 undergraduate students,” Seidman said. “I am the elected leader of approximately 3,000 faculty.”
“It is incredibly disappointing to me that the [Jefferson Council article] assumed we could not interact as colleagues,” Seidman said.
Seidman agreed it is important that faculty members not use student leaders to push their agenda, stating “student leaders should – and do – have their own priorities, agency, etc.”
“This shows in the different actions and statements students and faculty made at UVA over the past year,” Seidman said. “Understanding what a group with different priorities is doing doesn't need to change our choices but it can still help shape how we explain our choices.”
The Jefferson Council detailed what it considered the “inappropriate” parts of Seidman and Dickerson’s text messages in its release.
On Aug. 25, 2025, Dickerson said to Seidman regarding a rally that was described as taking place for “community solidarity” between students, staff, and faculty: “In response to your email I can say whatever you need me to. Let me know whatever I need to do and I can.”
Seidman responded with: “We can decide who says what tomorrow.”
Additionally, the Jefferson Council stated that Seidman was the main coordinator of this August rally designing “the route and staging location, coordinating logistics via text in the days and hours leading up to it.”
The Cavalier Daily reported at the time that “Seidman…noted that the Faculty Senate chose to collaborate with Student Council to show solidarity between University students, faculty and staff.”
Dickerson told Seidman the night before the rally: "I have no idea what the turnout will be. I didn't get a response from class councils,” and the next morning said “couldn't get class councils on board unfortunately but I'll do my best through word of mouth."
“This was not solidarity,” the Jefferson Council said. “The Student Council President couldn't even get his own organization's constituent bodies to participate.”
“What Seidman described publicly as a unified expression of student support was, in reality, a rally she formulated, organized, seeded anonymously on social media, and left to a single undergraduate to pull together on his own as her pawn,” the Jefferson Council said.
Seidman also had a hand in the anti-Board of Visitors campaign, and the no-confidence vote the Student Council passed relating to the BOV – all of whom were appointed by former Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Neither UVA spokesman Brian Coy nor Clay Dickerson responded to The Center Square’s requests for comment.
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