Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who lost her seat in November, is in talks to move her leadership program for young women to George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, according to the dean of the school.
Mark J. Rozell, the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said Comstock called him in the days after the election to discuss the idea.
She volunteered to raise $250,000 in private funds to launch the program and pay for a single staffer to arrange the speakers and trips that are the hallmark of the summer program, Rozell said. The program, designed for girls in middle and high school, will be named the Barbara Comstock Institute for Women in Leadership, he said.
“If you can turn young women on to public service and teach them they can do anything men can do — and maybe we’ll even recruit a few of them in to our school in the future — to me, that’s just a win-win for everybody,” he said.
Comstock and a spokesman did not return messages seeking comment Tuesday, but the lawmaker acknowledged the move in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.
She started an early iteration of the 10th Congressional District Young Women Leadership Program in 2013, while she served in the House of Delegates, and moved it to the U.S. House when she took office in 2015.
She has said she was inspired to start the program by Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.”
The program exposes hundreds of girls annually to successful women from government and private industry, many of whom Comstock knows from decades in the Washington region.
Past speakers include Sheila Johnson, the co-founder of BET and CEO of Salamander Hotels and Resorts; Donna Brazile, former interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee; Sunita Williams, an astronaut; and Anita McBride, former chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush.
Another speaker, Bobbie Kilberg, president and CEO of Northern Virginia Technology Council and veteran of four GOP presidential administrations, said GMU’s diverse student body makes it the right place for the program, which attracts students from the Washington suburbs and rural counties to the west.
“The point was to expose them to how government works,” Kilberg said in a phone interview, “what are different career paths in the government sector and the private sector, and what kind of education you need to have a shot at those jobs and how you prepare yourself for the 21st century.”
Participants have visited the Supreme Court, the set of the NBC show “Meet the Press,” Google, Facebook and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Rozell, who anticipated criticism that Comstock’s program would be partisan, noted that politicians from both sides of the aisle are affiliated with GMU.
Democrat and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe is a guest lecturer, and former Virginia secretary of education Anne Holton is on the faculty as a visiting professor. Thomas M. Davis, a former congressional representative, and former state delegate David Ramadan, both Republicans, teach classes. Comstock will not teach at GMU, Rozell said.
