The Trump administration has debuted a new tactic in its crusade against colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — singling out a university leader who the government felt wasn’t aligned with its goals.
The president of the University of Virginia, James E. Ryan, announced on Friday that he will resign as UVa seeks to resolve a Department of Justice investigation into the institution’s DEI commitments. Ryan announced his decision a day after The New York Times reported that the department’s civil-rights office had conditioned ending the investigation on Ryan’s departure.
Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel at the American Council on Education, called the government’s handling of the matter “a potentially ominous effort to control a learning environment it finds objectionable.”
“This is unprecedented,” McDonough said in an interview. “Maybe we should have seen it coming.”
Ryan, who has served as president since 2018, said on Friday that he could not make a “unilateral decision to fight the federal government” in order to save his job. To do so, he wrote in a message to the campus community, would “appear selfish and self-centered” to the staff members who would lose their jobs, researchers who would lose their grants, and students who could lose their financial aid or visas if the Trump administration attempted to bring the public institution to its knees.
Ryan wrote that he had planned to step down at the end of the next academic year anyway. “This was an excruciatingly difficult decision,” he said, “and I am heartbroken to be leaving this way.”
Robert Hardie, who leads UVa’s Board of Visitors as its rector, said that with “profound sadness” he had accepted Ryan’s resignation. The New York Times reported on Friday that Ryan’s resignation letter said he could leave immediately, but no later than August 15.
In a statement to The Chronicle, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the agency welcomed leadership changes at UVa that indicated a commitment to federal civil-rights laws.
The Trump administration has accused UVa of violating Title VI, which bars racial discrimination in education, because the university has maintained some DEI programs and staff. The university’s board voted in March to dissolve the central diversity office, but UVa officials moved a few programs it had deemed “legally permissible” to other divisions, as many colleges have done.
The Chronicle reported last month that the Justice Department’s interest in UVa stemmed from a web of connections among government lawyers, Republican appointees on the university’s board, and a conservative alumni group opposed to Ryan’s leadership — including his support for intentional efforts to increase racial diversity on the campus.
Funding at Stake
The Trump administration has been privately demanding for the past month that Ryan step down, according to the Times, and warned that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding was at stake.
In a CNN interview on Friday, Dhillon, Trump’s civil-rights official, disputed the idea that the department had demanded Ryan’s resignation as a condition for preserving funding.
Dhillon said that the department had told UVa representatives that the government “lacked confidence” in Ryan, given his “participation in groups” that had publicly opposed the Trump administration’s policies. (Ryan, along with hundreds of other college presidents, signed a letter condemning “unprecedented government overreach” in higher education.)
But one of Virginia’s congressional representatives said the resignation demand was explicit. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, told CBS News that UVa had received a letter indicating that if Ryan “didn’t resign on a day last week, by five o’clock, all these cuts would take place.”
In her statement to The Chronicle, Dhillon said the Justice Department has told UVa and other colleges that the government has a “zero-tolerance policy” for “illegal discrimination.”
She added: “When university leaders lack commitment to ending illegal discrimination in hiring, admissions, and student benefits — they expose the institutions they lead to legal and financial peril.”
Dhillon and Gregory Brown, her deputy, are both UVa graduates. On Friday morning, Brown posted a photo of himself on X smoking a cigar with the caption “Sic Semper Tyrannis” — the state motto for Virginia — meaning that those who seize power will be overthrown.
The Justice Department initially made demands of UVa on April 28, placing the university on a short timeline to prove that all vestiges of DEI at the institution were gone. A day later, the university’s board rescinded racial-equity targets approved amid the George Floyd protests in 2020.
America First Legal, a legal advocacy group aligned with Trump, called on the Justice Department to investigate UVa on May 22, and within a week, the Trump administration confirmed that it had opened a review of UVa’s compliance with Title VI.
The Jefferson Council, an alumni group that has long condemned the university’s diversity-focused investments as wasteful, helped get the attention of the Trump administration.
The group’s campaign aimed to expose what it saw as the university’s continued adherence to DEI and to urge the board to fire Ryan, its co-founder told The Chronicle. Throughout his seven-year tenure, Ryan has been a staunch proponent of diversifying the campus. He maintained similar commitments at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he served as dean before taking the reins at UVa.
Faculty members at every university should be worried that the federal government believes it has the right to decide who their leader should be.
The Jefferson Council, in a statement Friday, called Ryan’s resignation “a necessary and welcome step toward restoring intellectual diversity, depoliticizing the university, and commitment to equal treatment for all.”
‘Heartbroken’ and ‘Shocked’
The successful pressure campaign to agitate UVa into pushing out its president marks a notable escalation for the Trump administration, faculty members and other supporters of Ryan told The Chronicle.
In a statement to The Chronicle, Ann Brown, a co-chair of the advisory council for Wahoos4UVA, an alumni advocacy group that supports Ryan, called the coerced resignation an assault “on the very principles of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and democratic governance.”
“Jim Ryan has been a singularly effective leader and has made UVa stronger even through times of challenge and tragedy,” Brown wrote. “It is shameful for the Trump administration’s Justice Department to use unconstitutional extortionate tactics to erase that legacy.”
The executive board of UVa’s student council said in a statement that it was “heartbroken, shocked, and frustrated” by Ryan’s resignation.
“The important right of a public institution to govern itself has been stripped and commandeered by federal forces,” the board wrote, “and the loss of President Ryan is the latest domino to fall.”
Jeri Seidman, chair-elect of UVa’s Faculty Senate, said faculty members are worried about who the interim president will be and whether they will have any say in the permanent replacement.
The senate’s executive council on Friday passed a resolution calling on the board to condemn the Justice Department’s demands that Ryan resign, and to meet with the senate to “clarify the circumstances and negotiations” that led to the decision.
“Faculty members at every university,” Seidman said, “should be worried that the federal government believes it has the right to decide who their leader should be.”
