Style Weekly
The University of Richmond's governing body seems to have a message for students and alumni: Please stop contacting us.
Following its much-debated decision to replace the men's soccer and track programs with lacrosse, the private university's board of trustees went underground recently, pulling a listing from its website that included the names of board members. The move appears to make UR the only major university in the state that doesn't publicly list its board members online.
Students and alumni lobbied the board to reconsider its lacrosse plan, but it stuck by the decision following its most recent meeting in December. The action was controversial, seemingly the impetus for alumnus and major university donor Bobby Ukrop to resign from his position as a trustee, a decision Ukrop confirmed with the Times-Dispatch without explaining his reasons.
The university didn't respond to a request for comment on the disappearance of the list of board of trustees members from its website. The school previously has declined to speak to Style Weekly about matters relating to the board.
In the wake of the lacrosse decision, one of the school's student government associations passed a resolution asking for more transparency from the board and condemning "the total exclusion of students from the process used to reach the decision."
In separate news related to the university's board, retired Gulf War commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who died last week, was a former trustee.
Update (Jan. 2, 2013)
UR Spokeswoman Linda Evans got back to us just after our print deadline on Friday to say the listing of trustees was taken down several weeks ago while some "minor changes" are made to it. She expects it to come back online this week. Any connection to the page coming down at a time when board members were being lobbied hard by UR soccer and track supporters? A coincidence, UR says.
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