The university needed bold ideas, he told the new Racial Equity Task Force, and it needed them quickly.
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
The university needed bold ideas, he told the new Racial Equity Task Force, and it needed them quickly.
Two months later, the three-person task force delivered a 12-point plan.
Drawing on input from hundreds of students, faculty and staff members, and town-hall participants, it included working to dramatically increase the number of students of color. The plan also called for doubling the number of faculty members from underrepresented racial backgrounds, removing tributes to the Confederacy and eugenicists, and dedicating up to $950 million toward these and other racial-equity efforts. The Board of Visitors signed off on most of the recommendations, and the university set about putting aspirations into action.
Now, five years later, the university has been ordered to scrap two key diversity goals. Ryan is under intensifying pressure from board members and others to see that DEI is completely abolished at UVa, a purple-state flagship founded by Thomas Jefferson and built by enslaved laborers.
Acting on a March 7 directive from the Board of Visitors, which in turn was acting on anti-DEI edicts from President Trump that are now being challenged in the courts, the university dissolved its central DEI office. It began moving some “legally permissible” programs to other divisions.
It has not, however, released details about who, or what, has moved or whether anyone has been laid off, prompting some critics of DEI to question how much has really changed. Now the dispute has caught the attention of the Department of Justice, which has pushed well beyond the changes the board had ordered. Department lawyers demanded proof by the end of the month that all vestiges of DEI at Virginia have been eliminated.
The Justice Department became involved through a web of connections among its lawyers, members of the university board, and a conservative alumni group that has set its sights not just on UVa’s DEI programs, but on the president they hold responsible for implementing them.
In April, the board rescinded those racial-equity targets approved in 2020. Across the university, schools and programs are revamping their diversity initiatives to ensure they’re race-neutral and that they’re complying with federal and state antidiscrimination laws.
The university’s about-face is symbolic of the rapid buildup and unraveling of DEI, even in states, including Virginia, whose legislatures haven’t banned it. (In March, Virginia’s education secretary directed higher-education boards to eliminate any admissions or hiring practices that included racial preferences.)
But the crackdown at Virginia also shows how messy the unwinding of DEI can be, particularly in the harsh light of the Trump administration’s threats to revoke funding from institutions that maintain DEI offices or teach about systemic racism.
What does it mean to stamp out DEI, when the definition is as vague as the orders are sweeping? And how can a university under orders to quash it satisfy critics who see it lurking behind the administrators and programs left standing when a central office closes? These are questions the Trump administration and conservative activists are eagerly prosecuting. At UVa, a presidency hangs in the balance.
Posted on the door of a dorm room on the Lawn was a sign that said “F— UVa.” It linked the university to genocide and slavery. Ellis confronted the student who’d put up the sign, and the case garnered local and national attention. Ryan defended the student’s First Amendment right to post the sign and refused to have it taken down.
Frustrated by that controversy, and by the scope of the Racial Equity Task Force, Ellis and another alumnus, Thomas Neale, in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.
The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful and argued that it forced community members to accept leftist dogma. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, hoping to prompt alumni to bring concerns to the Board of Visitors.
“The mission of the Jefferson Council when we established it was to be a voice for the alumni that have been aced out by the fact that the Alumni Association became nothing more than a fund-raising mouthpiece of the administration,” Ellis told The Chronicle. (Asked to respond, the president of the association said it takes seriously its “role of serving as an indispensable conduit for alumni sentiments back to the administration.”)
Recently, the council has broadened its campaign: It’s pushing the board to oust Ryan.
Since taking office nearly seven years ago, Ryan has displayed consistent support for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In his 2018 inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing the university’s checkered racial history, a central tenet of the task-force plan and DEI writ large.
The campus community, he said, should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of African Americans and women well into the 20th century. He urged recognition of both Thomas Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality.” And he enthused about the majority of UVa students being women, about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college, about the freshman class being the most diverse in the university’s history.
Neale told The Chronicle the Jefferson Council isn’t opposed to DEI on its face, but rather the way that it is applied — the quotas and contextualization and spending it entails.
He said the council has taken issue with much of Ryan’s agenda, but the president’s failure to fully dismantle UVa’s DEI infrastructure is the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We can say Jim Ryan is not fair to students who are moderate or conservative, Jim Ryan should not be supporting a group that supports terrorism,” Neale said. “That’s not going to get him fired. DEI is pretty black and white. You have to follow the law.”
In its first few years of existence, according to financial-disclosure forms, the Jefferson Council received contributions from right-leaning organizations like the Marcus Foundation and the Common Sense Society, as well as from nonpartisan sources like the Community Foundation of Richmond. In the 2023 fiscal year, the Jefferson Council held $265,169 in assets, records show.
The council, which has no formal affiliation with the university, doesn’t have a system of formal membership, but its email listserv reaches around 13,000 people, according to its president, Joel Gardner, a 1970 alumnus. It has also brought criticism directly to the board, whose makeup changed when Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, replaced former Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, in 2022.
That year, Youngkin appointed Ellis and a slate of other conservatives to the board, and Ellis stepped away from the Jefferson Council.
“The governor put me on the board and wanted me to be an active voice, to ‘Take the beach and hold the beach for reinforcements to come’ from his subsequent appointments,” Ellis said. The goal was “to move the university from hard left back towards the middle. Nobody had any intention of trying to make [the] University of Virginia into Hillsdale or some type of conservative university.”
Their complaints were amplified a hundredfold in January, when Trump issued an executive order demanding the elimination of “radical and wasteful” DEI activities. The following month, his administration doubled down with a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening to yank federal funds from colleges that don’t comply. His orders are being challenged in court.
In Virginia, Trump had an eager warrior in Ellis, who told a local newspaper that every aspect of DEI should be “ripped out, shredded, and terminated.” His confrontational behavior and public statements ultimately cost him his seat on the board, when Youngkin removed him in March for unspecified conduct violations.
With Ellis excised, the Jefferson Council still had a few other alumni who were now in a position to put serious pressure on the board. When a UVa law alum and Trump loyalist, Harmeet K. Dhillon, was assigned to lead the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in April, Gregory W. Brown, from the undergraduate class of 1989, became her deputy.
Brown’s connections with his alma mater run deep. As an alum, he chose to endow in perpetuity the dorm room he lived in his fourth year. As a lawyer in private practice, he represented two UVa students whose lawsuits against the university ended in settlements. The cases became causes célèbres for the Jefferson Council, which took credit for referring the clients to Brown.
One case involved Morgan Bettinger, a 2021 alum who was disciplined as a student for allegedly comparing “Black Women Matter” protesters lying down in the street to speed bumps. (This came three years after torch-carrying neo-Nazis clashed with counterprotesters on campus and a white supremacist drove his car through a crowd downtown, killing a local antiracist activist.) Bettinger said comments she made in jest in 2020 were misconstrued. Brown also represented Matan Goldstein, a Jewish undergraduate who accused the university of failing to protect him from threats and harassment by pro-Palestinian protesters.
It’s unclear how much contact council members have had with Brown since he’s been at the DOJ. Council members said Brown had attended at least one of the council’s meetings within the last few years. He was invited to the council’s annual meeting and dinner this spring, but did not attend. He was listed as a scheduled speaker at the annual meeting as recently as late February, according to an archived webpage. Council members interviewed by The Chronicle made it clear that they saw him as someone who could help their cause, which included getting rid of DEI.
On Tuesday, Brown linked to a Jefferson Council post on X that suggested that the university is “doubling down behind closed doors — even now with an active DOJ investigation going on.”
“Say it ain’t so... @HarmeetKDhillon wants a word …” Brown wrote.
Council members said they had not met with Dhillon. But the Jefferson Council and the DOJ have been hammering away at the university with similar demands and critiques coming just days or weeks apart.
On April 9, an anonymous Charlottesville resident who follows and is followed by the Jefferson Council on social media posted a link on X to a website created by the Jefferson Council, urging people to report evidence of “where DEI is still hiding” at UVa.
James A. Bacon, a former executive director of the council and a conservative legal blogger, was next out of the gate with a “30-day update,” questioning whether the university had in fact complied with the board’s order to terminate DEI.
“The big question is what has happened to the employees of the no-longer-extant DEI offices?” Bacon wrote in an April 11 council blog post. “Have the jobs been eliminated, or have they just been switched to new boxes on the org chart?”
At colleges nationwide that are under orders to eliminate DEI, central offices have been dissolved or renamed with terms like community engagement or belonging. In Texas and Florida, dozens of people were laid off; elsewhere, most were moved to new positions, with new titles and responsibilities. Conservative critics have accused colleges of “hiding” DEI by renaming positions and programs.
At UVa, some schools and departments have maintained diversity-related commitments. The university’s Darden School of Business asserts that its “inclusive excellence framework helps us infuse inclusion and belonging into every aspect of our operation and culture.”
After combing through sites like LinkedIn and mentions on the university website, Bacon said he determined that most of the employees who’d been working in some kind of diversity job are still employed by UVa, although their titles and responsibilities may have changed. He listed the 17 he’d tracked down, suggesting the president couldn’t be trusted to fire any of them.
Since Ryan became UVa’s president in 2018, DEI “has been his pinnacle achievement,” Bacon said. “It was foolhardy to think that he was going to reverse gear with any enthusiasm to undo everything he did. My operating supposition is he’s slow-walking these changes, doing everything he can to delay, delay, delay, until the political situation changes.” Governor Youngkin is ineligible to run for reelection in November, and the candidate now leading in the polls to replace him, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, is a Democrat.
Ryan declined to comment on the Jefferson Council’s attacks or on the status of DEI at the university. A spokesman cited the Justice Department’s investigation for the university’s public silence.
On April 27, the Jefferson Council ramped up the pressure, taking out a full-page ad in a local newspaper urging the board to fire Ryan. In one crudely drawn cartoon, Ryan thumbs his nose at Youngkin, who carries a sign declaring that “DEI is dead at UVa.”
The following day, less than two weeks after Bacon posted his list of DEI-related programs and people who were still around, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Ryan and the Board of Visitors’ rector, Robert D. Hardie, demanding a similar accounting.
The university leaders were given until the end of the week to turn over detailed information about how the university was getting rid of every vestige of DEI to comply with the department’s interpretation of the board’s March 7 order.
The letter referred to complaints — it didn’t say from whom — about the university’s alleged failure to comply with the board’s directive. It demanded updates on every student and faculty and staff member who worked in any diversity-related job, whether they’ve been fired, and, if they’re still around, what their new titles and job responsibilities are.
It was a surprisingly prescriptive list of demands. The board, in its resolution to dissolve the central DEI office, had not specifically required the university to fire anyone or eliminate specific programs. The Justice Department gave Ryan and Hardie less than a week to turn over all the information, but later agreed to extend the deadline from May 2 to May 31.
The day the letter was delivered, the Jefferson Council reposted on X a copy that one of its followers had obtained. The anonymous follower, under the name C’villeBubble, who did not return requests for comment, was the same Charlottesville person who had circulated the request for complaints about where DEI might be hiding.
Jefferson Council members celebrated the Justice Department’s crackdown.
“UVa leaders will have both the Board of Visitors and the U.S. Office of Civil Rights breathing down their necks,” Bacon wrote on his personal blog on April 29, the day after the DOJ letter was delivered to Ryan and Hardie. Referring to board members, he added that the council “will be breathing down their necks.”
Bacon said that the Jefferson Council hasn’t formally communicated with anyone from the Department of Justice, but that he can’t rule out the possibility that some members might have done so individually. “I like to think that people at DOJ are following what we write,” Bacon said.
It’s unclear why UVa was singled out for such aggressive enforcement. A spokesperson for the DOJ did not respond to a question about whether other universities had received similar lists of demands proving that all evidence of DEI had been eliminated. She did not make either Brown or Dhillon available for comment.
Higher-education lawyers and policymakers who have been closely following the Trump administration’s attacks on colleges see parallels with other recent cases. The DOJ letter is indicative of “the vague and sweeping nature of the executive orders issued by the Trump administration” as well as the lack of due process for targeted institutions, said Neal H. Hutchens, a lawyer and professor of educational policy studies and evaluation at the University of Kentucky.
“The DOJ demand for information doesn’t seem to be tied to a specific investigation or inquiry as to how specific DEI practices or incidents violated federal law, such as Title VI,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Instead, the DOJ seems to be demanding obedience from UVa that is more akin to what a governing authority or state agency charged with oversight of a public university might be able to seek as part of their broad oversight powers.” That, he argued, is an inappropriate intrusion into matters outside the Justice Department’s purview.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, called the UVa demands “a troubling example” of the kind of government overreach that more than 650 presidents and other college leaders have objected to by signing a letter the association circulated last month.
“We still have civil-rights law to contend with,” she said, and DEI encompasses not only race, gender, and sexuality issues, but the rights of veterans, disabled, and first-generation students.
“How would you demonstrate that you’ve eliminated every aspect of our trying to create places of belonging for people of all diverse backgrounds?” Pasquerella asked. “There’s no way to adequately respond because, as the Columbia case showed us, no matter what you’re doing, it will never be enough. They’ll keep changing the rules and issuing more executive orders.”
Jeri K. Seidman, an associate professor of commerce and chair-elect of the Faculty Senate, said the Jefferson Council members have a grander vision for themselves than is currently felt on campus.
“I don’t think that many people really are aware of them,” Seidman said. “I think those who are see them as a group of alumni who had a wonderful experience here at UVa and really love UVa and who are struggling to kind of reconcile the UVa of today with the UVa that they knew.”
She said she doubts there is a groundswell of support on the board for getting rid of Ryan. While 13 of the 17 voting members are Youngkin appointees, Seidman said the majority of the board respects Ryan and would be happy to continue working with him. And she said the faculty is broadly supportive of Ryan, whom she described as the first president in her career that she felt like she knew.
Walter F. Heinecke, an associate professor of education and past president of UVa’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the board also likely wants to avoid a repeat of 2012, when the ouster of Teresa A. Sullivan as president caused an uprising that led to her quick reinstatement.
But the summer presents the opportunity to make a big change with few people watching. The board next meets in early June. Later that month, the four Democratic appointees’ terms expire.
“The game is, you wait for the students and the faculty to disappear over the summer, and then you take those actions,” said Heinecke.
But some of Ryan’s defenders are taking a page from the Jefferson Council’s playbook and promising to keep the pressure up. A new campaign, Wahoos4UVa, calls on alumni to write to the Board of Visitors and urge it to resist “partisan attacks” on Ryan and the university.
“We must come to the table with others and collectively ensure viewpoint diversity and ensure that all feel welcome at our university, and that includes every political persuasion across the board,” said Ashley Apple, a co-founder who clarified that she was speaking in her capacity as an alum and not as an assistant professor of nursing at the university. “What’s happening right now is that a small fringe group has made it their mission to politicize university leadership, to attack president Jim Ryan in an attempt to oust him, and it’s all partisan politics.”
“DEI, in the years in which it has been in existence, has fundamentally changed the culture of the university from top to bottom in its policies and directives,” Bacon said. For example: Resident advisers who once handled mundane duties like settling disputes between roommates are now trained to focus on “woke issues” involving students’ racial and gender identities, he contends. (A campus spokesman declined comment when asked whether student-training programs like the multicultural peer educators still exist.)
“One of the questions I’ve been raising is ‘What is DEI in the first place?’” Bacon said. In a personal blog post, he added, “Neither Trump’s Office of Civil Rights, the Youngkin administration, nor the Board of Visitors has defined DEI — the thing that they want to get rid of. No one should be surprised, then, if Ryan operates with his own definition in mind.”
Without any clear consensus, people on both sides of the DEI debate find themselves asking a follow-up question: How do you know when it’s gone?
In 2023, Ryan argued in The Chronicle Review that defenders of diversity, equity, and inclusion like himself should settle on a working definition of DEI.
“I disagree with those who would like to prohibit DEI efforts altogether,” Ryan wrote. “Colleges should continue to promote the core elements of DEI, as these efforts are crucial to ensuring opportunity and access, attracting and retaining the most talented people, creating a vibrant campus culture, and promoting a richer and more robust exchange of ideas. But 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 may not have a chance.
