In 2021, the then-leftist Virginia state government enacted a requirement for all public colleges throughout the state to track down and compensate the descendents of former slaves. The effort, as expected, is proving to be nothing more than an expensive and ineffective virtue signaling exercise, according to a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The actual implementation of the “Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program,” which is designed to take the money of people who have never owned slaves and redistribute it to students who have never been slaves, has been unsurprisingly plagued with countless challenges.
Record-keeping from the post-slavery era is incomplete at best, with only fragments of information–first names, sometimes just nicknames–available to the researchers who have been tasked with identifying those who should receive reparations.
The program’s poor rollout and near-impossible requirements are only made worse by the threat of penalties for institutions that fail to meet the program’s demands. Colleges that do not comply with the law’s requirements, whether by failing to provide scholarships or not “sufficiently memorializing their involvement in slavery,” will lose state funding once enforcement begins in 2025.
The law ties the program directly to state appropriations, meaning that colleges that fail to comply with the law could see their funding reduced or cut entirely. This could have an astronomical impact on their operating budgets, and potentially lead to increased tuition costs to offset the losses.
Undoubtedly, requiring each of the 39 public colleges throughout the commonwealth to assign employees to work on piecing together these broken records is also wasting a considerable amount of staff time.
Instead of forcing the payment of reparations at the expense of students and taxpayers, perhaps Virginia’s former black-face-wearing leftist governor who oversaw the passing of this law should foot the bill himself.
