University of Virginia Historians Resign from Policy Center over Marc Short Appointment

Two leading historians have announced they will be leaving the University of Virginia’s Miller Center following the appointment of former senior White House aide Marc Short.

In a joint statement released on Monday, Melvyn Leffler and William Hitchcock said they are resigning in protest after the school’s public policy center granted a “senior fellowship” to Marc Short, the former Trump White House Legislative Affairs Director.

The professors said in a statement:

The appointment of Mr. Short runs counter to the Center’s fundamental values of non-partisanship, transparency, openness, a passion for truth and objectivity, and civility. It seems especially egregious to appoint Mr. Short as we approach the one-year anniversary of the neo-Nazi riots. In the wake of those tragic events, President Trump failed to repudiate the alt-right and its street thugs. Until his appointment to a fellowship at UVA, Mr. Short did not distance himself from President Trump’s remarks.

Leffler and Hitchcock, who say the University of Virginia’s leadership hired Short without “adequate faculty discussion,” or a vote, accuse the former Trump aide of being complicit in the “erosion of our civic discourse,” and demonstrating “appalling indifference to the civility.”

The school has come under fire for bringing Short aboard. A petition demanding Short’s appointment be rescinded reached 2,300 signatures on Monday. William Antholis, CEO of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, has moved to defend the former White House official. Short “brings a missing critical voice — one that represents members of Congress and the Republican Party who continue to support the president in large numbers,” Antholis said in a statement last Friday.

As Breitbart News’s Neil Munro previously reported, “Short is a former top aide to the Koch network, which is still pushing for a bigger inflow of immigrant workers, consumers, and renters. Trump picked him to run his Hill outreach office at the advice of Vice President Mike Pence, who hired Short during the 2016 campaign, even though Short also helped to run a NeverTrump operation during the primaries.”

Short is widely considered as having failed to help turn President Donald Trump’s immigration policies into legislation “I don’t see him as the real deal-maker so much as the kind of go-between, the mediator,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R WV) told Politico. “He doesn’t try to reshape our thoughts. He sort of takes it in, and then, I’m assuming, reports back to the White House.”

In addition to joining the Miller Center, Short will join the establishment-Republican lobbying outfit Guidepost Strategies.