When UVA President Scott Beardsley chartered a 22-member committee in July to help shape the University’s next strategic plan, the roster read like a map of institutional leadership: deans, department chairs, a rector, a provost, the CEO of UVA Health. One name stands out: rising fourth-year McIntire student Noah Dyer, the committee’s only undergraduate, captain of Virginia’s Men’s Swimming & Diving team, and president of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
The appointment reached him before he grasped its full weight. Only after a conversation with co-chair and Darden Lecturer R. Marc Johnson did he realize he would be the committee’s sole undergrad. He’s understandably got “mixed feelings of excitement and pressure in representing, trying to represent, and engaging as many student voices as possible.”
Mentors have helped him settle on a clear approach: bring his own perspective as an athlete and a McIntire student while making sure other students are heard. “I’m incredibly honored to work with President Beardsley and the team on this,” he says. “I think it’s really high impact.”
A Bird’s-Eye View
Dyer is quick to note that the views he brings are his own and not the committee’s. He is equally quick to reframe how he plans to occupy the seat. Instead of speaking only for athletes or Commerce students, he intends to approach the work “as a representative on behalf of the student body.” That posture, which he acknowledges is new to him, requires learning how the whole institution fits together. It means taking “a bird’s-eye view of the University,” seeing UVA “not only as an academic institution, but also a health provider.”
Rather than creating a separate listening campaign, Dyer plans to work through existing student networks. The committee will run a communitywide survey along with in-person and virtual sessions, and he sees no value in a parallel channel. “I think that would just segment things unnecessarily,” he says. He plans instead to reach students through the leaders of Contracted Independent Organizations (CIOs); class council presidents; and the athletics community at the team, club, and grade level.
A Test for Real Strategy
Noah Dyer (left), McIntire Professor Gary Ballinger (second from right), and fellow Commerce students
Gathering input is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is another. As Dyer weighs how the committee will balance competing priorities, he keeps returning to a lesson from his McIntire coursework.
In a strategy course with Professor Paul Seaborn, he absorbed a test he now applies reflexively: If the opposite of a stated idea is obviously foolish, it is not a strategy. Real strategy, in other words, requires making choices, not merely stating good intentions.
“It’s not a strategy to say we’re going to make good products,” Dyer explains, because no one would propose the reverse. The lesson now informs how he thinks about institutional planning. By the same logic, committing to student development is not a strategy either. “Best practices is the baseline. That’s what’s expected.” Strategy means allocating finite resources methodically, with data behind the choice. More than a classroom takeaway, the lesson now shapes how he approaches the committee’s work.
Thinking Beyond Revenue
That framework becomes concrete when Dyer turns to an area he knows well: athletics. A member of UVA’s Men’s Swimming & Diving team, he praises Director of Athletics Carla Williams and her staff for navigating the financial pressures of the House v. NCAA settlement (the antitrust agreement that allows schools to share revenue directly with athletes), decisions he views as responses to forces outside the University’s control.
One place Dyer believes the plan should make a deliberate choice is the standing of Olympic sports in an era when football, basketball, and women’s basketball generate the revenue. “I believe in the equitable treatment of Olympic sports,” he says, tying the point to the department’s stated purpose. Athletics exists “to aid in the academic development of citizen leaders.” In his reading, Olympic sports are central to that mission rather than adjacent to it, which is exactly the kind of resource allocation his strategy test demands.
Dyer will be finishing his final semester at McIntire around the time the plan reaches the Board of Visitors in April, so he understands that he won’t experience the benefits of it as a student. And while he can’t control how the plan is carried out, he reasons that he will be satisfied if the committee holds to the right guiding principles it establishes early in the process.
