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University of Virginia President Scott Beardsley graduates from Pembroke
NEWS |
Scott Beardsley is President of the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Last Saturday, he joined Pembroke’s worldwide alumni community as he graduated with a Masters in Practical Ethics from Pembroke and the Uehiro Oxford Institute.
Beardsley began studying for the Masters in 2023, while dean of UVA’s Darden School of Business. Less than a year earlier, ChatGPT had been publicly released, and more generative AI models were on the horizon. An earlier career with McKinsey & Company had given Beardsley significant expertise in internet and telecommunications technology, and he was aware that a big shift was coming. Ethics, he understood, and particularly the ethics of rapidly evolving AI technology, would be critical not only for his own leadership and team, but for future generations of leaders earning their degrees at UVA.
“With the rise of AI, I felt there was a new need to come up to speed on how to think about it,” he said. “I realised that this would become a major issue for higher education specifically, as well as society in general, and that we would need to think about how to regulate this technology and what ethics would come into play.”
Describing himself as “a voracious lifelong learner”, Beardsley responded by enrolling on the Oxford programme. Its hybrid format allowed him to continue his role at the Darden School of Business, and then as President of UVA. His dissertation focused on a key regulatory question: Should agentic AI be treated and regulated as a stakeholder and legal person, as a corporation would be?
Beardsley was struck by Oxford’s mode of teaching, which encourages students to defend and challenge their own and others’ ideas. “What I learned, and what I knew inherently, is that there are always arguments against something. Whatever point of view you have, you have to define your terms and think through the opposite point of view,” he reflected. “This is all very relevant to UVA. If there is viewpoint diversity, and if we design that into our learning, it is a very effective method.”
Scott Beardsley became UVA’s 10th President in January 2026. The University of Virginia, founded as a public institution in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, was the first of its kind, becoming a model for modern universities around the world. Today it is home to world-class research programmes and seeks to create an environment where students and professors learn from one another and collaborate across disciplines.