Even before taking office last Saturday, new Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, demanded and received the resignations of several of her Republican predecessor Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to the board that oversees the University of Virginia. In a similar vein, the state’s new attorney general, Democrat Jay Jones, forced out legal counsels at George Mason University and the Virginia Military Institute who were appointed by his Republican predecessor.

Job changes at state colleges aren’t usually national news. But what Spanberger and Virginia Democrats are doing matters well beyond the Old Dominion. Republicans like President Trump and Youngkin keep appointing right-wing partisans to traditionally apolitical roles like university board member and FBI director. These appointments are designed to turn key nonpartisan institutions into apparatuses for the Republican Party.

Democrats can’t leave these people in place. The next Democratic president must follow Spanberger’s and Jones’s examples and fire unqualified hacks that Trump has put into critical nonpartisan positions, particularly if the president eventually replaces Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with someone who will do the GOP’s bidding even if it doesn’t make economic sense. (Powell’s term ends in May.)

Republican leaders no longer believe in nonpartisan institutions or nonpartisan appointees chosen for their expertise. So many GOP appointees don’t believe in the true missions of the institutions that they are being put in charge of and aren’t qualified to lead them—and therefore must be removed from these jobs as quickly as possible.

What’s happened over the last year at the University of Virginia is one of the clearest examples of the GOP’s destructive plans for nonpartisan institutions, and something Spanberger had to address. Conservatives have long viewed elite colleges like UVA as........

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