Marie Nicolo remembers she was the first to speak at a hastily arranged Zoom meeting of the Virginia Wesleyan University Alumni Council on Aug. 22.
It was two days after the school announced it would become Batten University at an event the school said was a “special celebration of The Batten Legacy,” blindsiding Nicolo and other alumni.
"I said I was unhappy with the decision and how it was made, how no one knew it was coming, no one was brought into the decision-making or given a chance to voice their opinions," she recalled. "Why was the name Virginia Wesleyan taken out completely? They could have named it Virginia Wesleyan, Batten Campus. I was totally against the underhanded way it was done."
President Scott Miller, who shepherded the name change through the Board of Trustees in the months prior, did not attend the meeting. His Chief of Staff Kelly Cordova said the Alumni Council received invitations announcing a “special celebration of The Batten Legacy” where the surprise announcement was made.
“Because they were all invited to that event on August 20, there was no need for President Miller to be at the August 22 meeting,” Cordova said.
Cordova reassured the Alumni Council that only the name was changing and the school’s legacy would remain the same. She championed local philanthropist Jane Batten's donations to the university, concluding that it was only fitting to change the name, according to Nicolo’s recollection.
Eleven members attended the meeting, which began at noon and was announced in an email the previous day. Two of the 22 Alumni Council members had already resigned to protest the name change. They included Virginia Wesleyan Athletics Hall of Fame honoree Brandon Adair, a National Basketball Association referee who won a national basketball championship at the school.
Two members, including the Alumni Council chair, who serves as an ex officio member of the university’s Board of Trustees, asked why the council had not been included in name change discussions. Cordova told each of them it was a discussion to continue privately.
"That pretty much ended the meeting," Nicolo remembered.
She was awarded the Alumni Service Award in 2023 and was appointed to the VWU Alumni Council twice. She resigned in early September.
Nicolo has donated to the school monthly since her graduation in 1996; and she and her husband also make lump sum donations to the softball, basketball and baseball teams. That has ended, she said. She’s on the university’s Athletic Hall of Fame committee, but plans to resign. Until this year, she manned the beer tent at homecoming. She has regularly been invited to Miller's Christmas party. This year, she declined.
"Once you remove that Virginia Wesleyan name, the identity is gone," she said.
A campaign to 52 stakeholders
The Alumni Council meeting sheds light on a name change process that was a closely held internal campaign, and culmination of university President Scott Miller’s decade of leadership marked by decisions that have transformed Virginia Wesleyan.
The result has been a backlash, spawning a Stop the Renaming of Virginia Wesleyan movement that says it has nearly 6,000 petition signatures. The school responded with a Letters of Legacy campaign that, as of late last month had 16 letters. Eleven of them were from employees or trustees, four were from alumni and one was from the school mascot, Bob Marlin.
Gary Bonnewell has been on Virginia Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees member for 28 years and is an alumnus. He said he was convinced honoring Batten, whose family donated more than $150 million to the school, was the right choice, but he didn't anticipate the sustained backlash.
"We thought this was going to be much more accepted than it was," he said. "I mean, I was convinced."
Bonnewell and other trustees were persuaded by a campaign focused on the benefits of the change to honor a benefactor.
The idea of renaming the school after Batten goes back, Bonnewell said, to before Miller's tenure began in 2015. Batten, in an interview for The Washington Post, said she had opposed the idea, but agreed after the effort intensified over the past year.
Miller said the board's vote on the change this spring was unanimous.
But one Board of Trustees member did not vote and resigned after the name change, according to multiple alumni who contacted him and pages retrieved from a web archive showing board members before and after the vote.
The member, Mike White, did not respond to requests for an interview.
“The board member who resigned did not vote against the name change,” Miller said. “He had been dealing with health issues and was unable to participate in the pertinent conversations.”
Virginia Wesleyan examined five other universities that changed names over the past several decades -- Trine University, Rowan University, McDaniel College, Stevenson University and Arcadia University. Not all were renamed after benefactors. Some involved alumni, faculty and students in the decision.
Arcadia, for instance, changed from Beaver College after conducting surveys and focus groups of alumni, faculty, staff and students.
Miller said 52 stakeholders were confidentially interviewed for Virginia Wesleyan’s name change, but he declined to name any.
"We are a private institution. As such, we don’t have a public obligation," he wrote in emailed responses to follow-up interview questions. "We spoke with top donors, founders of the university, prominent community leaders deeply connected with the Batten family, as well as alumni, faculty, and staff."
He characterized a report about the change by prominent professor Craig Wansink as a "white paper," a term used in academia to describe a deeply researched product. The school has declined to release the report.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Jane Batten said the paper was instrumental in persuading her that the change was a good idea.
"It was over five years ago when I had somebody first suggest this idea, which just blew me away," she told The Post. "But this latest full-court press, I had to be persuaded by key people, key faculty people, key board people, key alums. And every single one was adamant that it was an important thing to do. And then one of the faculty people here that I admire most wrote a white paper that really convinced me that it's a good way to emphasize the mission of a school by drawing attention to it by changing the name."
But Wansink, the longtime professor of religious studies and leadership who wrote the report, said he spent half a day outlining his thoughts on what the Batten family had done for the school and how the change could benefit it.
"I didn't talk about pros and cons," he said. "I talked about why I felt, for her (Jane Batten), that it made sense."
He added that calling it a "white paper" has “different connotations,” and every time he heard it referred to as one, he told school officials not to use that label.
Miller, who has been a university president since 1991, said he’s comfortable calling Wansink’s document a white paper.
"I’m not retracting my use of the term," he said. "The phrase ‘white paper’ became a convenient internal shorthand for what Dr. Wansink produced."
Alumni fight back
Kim Mayo, VWU class of 1998, was an active alumna who organized her class reunions. She missed the August Alumni Council meeting but requested the name change be on the agenda for the Sept. 15 meeting, which Miller was scheduled to attend.
Her request was ignored. Cordova said the name change came up at the meeting when one council member asked about helping the transition to Batten University. Miller said at the Sept. 15 Alumni Council meeting he attended, there were no concerns raised about the name change.
"I've met with every group in the world since the announcement, and there is only one group, my Corporate Leaders Council, where one person in that group asked a series of questions," he said. "This included the Parents Council. This included the Student Government Association. It included a meeting with the Alumni Council. It included the faculty assembly."
After Mayo spoke about her disappointment with the process to local media outlets in October, Cordova sent her an email accepting her "de facto" resignation from the council. Miller claimed she told a staff member she was resigning. Mayo, an active alumna who organized her class reunions, denied she quit.
After the name change announcement, the school eventually disabled commenting on its social media pages.
"We gave them six (weeks). We let it run until homecoming, and then the same people over and over again were repeating the same message continuously, no matter what was posted," Miller said.
"For a lot of these people … they're grieving, okay? And the first stage is anger, and there's a lot of anger out there,” Bonnewell said. “I don't know when we're gonna get through this, but I've lost friendships because people don't want to agree to disagree."
Miller described the opposition as “mean-spirited attacks” in an interview with WAVY, something alumni opposing the change seized upon.
They organized an anti-Homecoming homecoming, assembling at Shore Break Restaurant in Virginia Beach on a Friday night in October.
They said more than 200 people attended. Bob Valvano, a member of the athletic hall of fame and brother of the late basketball coach Jim Valvano, spoke there about his decision to have his name removed from the hall.
After the announcement, Bob Valvano also penned an op-ed in The Virginian-Pilot: “Pulling on a shirt that says ‘Batten University’ elicits nothing but heartbreak,” he wrote. “Not because of the Batten family — I don’t know them at all — but because the simple act of changing the name and the manner in which it happened is contradictory to everything that made Wesleyan special.”
Meanwhile, Miller said the on-campus homecoming was well-attended.
"I was intentionally highly visible at all homecoming events, and very few people discussed the name change with me," he said. "Similarly, at the alumni golf tournament held off campus, I visited extensively with participants and received no negative comments or feedback."
Nicolo attended the Shorebreak opposition gathering, then protested outside the campus the next day. She stopped by the homecoming beer tent she usually worked in past years. Her memory contradicts Miller’s.
The event was "sparsely attended, most parents of current students," she said. "Hardly any alums."
Virginia Wesleyan University’s Scott Miller is on WHRO Public Media’s Governing Board of Directors. The board does not have any oversight over editorial decisions. Read more about WHRO Journalism’s editorial integrity and independence.
