Four years ago, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors endorsed a call to double the number of underrepresented faculty by 2030 and to develop a plan for building a student population that better reflected the state’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. The university’s president, James E. Ryan, said the move signaled that “becoming a more diverse, equitable place is both the right and the smart thing to do.”
On Tuesday, the board voted unanimously to rescind any such numerical goals as part of a sweeping effort to wipe out evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The Trump administration had warned university officials, only the day before, that it had received complaints that the university wasn’t acting fast enough to carry through on its promise to “dismantle DEI apparatuses.”
The about-face at Virginia comes as colleges nationwide are scrubbing and scrapping evidence of diversity initiatives that they enthusiastically supported in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter social-justice movement. Presidents like Ryan are in the hot seat, many torn between their desires to push back against what they see as government overreach and their need to hang on to their jobs.
On Monday, Ryan and the board’s rector, Robert D. Hardie, received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division reminding them that on March 7, the university’s Board of Visitors had voted unanimously to “dissolve DEI” at the university. The state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, had praised the board’s action, declaring that “DEI is done” at the university. Others weren’t so sure. The Justice Department said it had received complaints that the university “may have failed to implement these directives.”
The Board of Visitors’ March 7 resolution directed the university to close its central DEI office and move “legally permissible” programs to other offices. It also required the university to review programs across the campus to be sure they complied with President Trump’s anti-DEI directives and other applicable laws. It stressed the importance of assuring that people with diverse viewpoints felt welcome at the university and gave Ryan 30 days to report on the university’s progress.
In its letter on Monday, the Justice Department said the president had failed to produce a sufficiently detailed progress report. (A campus spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether the required report had been submitted.) It demanded that Ryan and Hardie certify by Friday that the vestiges of DEI have been removed from every division, department, program, and school. It also ordered the university to detail where every faculty or staff member or student who had worked in a DEI-related position is now, whether they’re still employed by the university, and what their title is. It needed to know which positions and titles had changed, and how. It additionally demanded any audio or video recordings of the board’s deliberations, both in public and closed sessions, before it voted to cut DEI.
Ryan was taking heat locally, as well. On Tuesday, the Jefferson Council, a conservative network of University of Virginia alumni, ran a full-page ad in The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, urging the board and the governor to fire Ryan, who it depicted in an illustration thumbing his nose at Youngkin. DEI, the ad said, is “pushed into every nook and cranny of life” at the university.
The Board of Visitors deliberated during a closed session on Tuesday. The public portion of the meeting was not live-streamed. It’s unclear whether the board brought up the fact that Ryan, who became president in 2018, was one of more than 550 higher-education leaders who signed a statement circulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) that condemned “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in academe.
The Faculty Senate was concerned enough about the board’s reaction that on Monday, it passed a resolution supporting Ryan and his decision to sign the AAC&U statement, saying it “expresses principles that are essential to upholding UVA’s mission, reputation, and operations.”
The Faculty Senate had encouraged Ryan to collaborate with other university presidents to promote higher education’s contributions to the nation. Ryan’s signature, it said, reaffirmed the university’s established policies on institutional statements and free expression. The former discourages the university from commenting on social or political issues “unless the matter directly affects the university’s mission or operations.”
In 2023, Ryan tackled the topic of DEI in an opinion piece in The Chronicle that called on colleges to better define what is meant by diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to explain why those values are important.
“In order to preserve and protect DEI, those of us working in higher education have to take the criticisms of DEI seriously — and do more to explain our efforts,” he wrote.
The pressures Ryan faces from the board are less intense, but still somewhat reminiscent of the tumultuous relationship that his predecessor, Teresa A. Sullivan, had with the board. Sullivan abruptly resigned in 2012, citing a “philosophical difference of opinion” with the university’s Board of Visitors, whose rector, Helen E. Dragas, had led a campaign to get rid of her.
Two weeks later, after a public outcry, the board reinstated Sullivan as president, a position she would hold until 2018. The American Association of University Professors decried the board’s treatment of Sullivan as a textbook example of board overreach and a failure to consult faculty in important governance decisions.
