Good morning, and welcome to Monday, June 30. Brock Read wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

DOJ takes down a president

Yes, the storm had been building. But this still feels sudden, and more than a little shocking: James E. Ryan is out as president of the University of Virginia.

On Thursday, as The New York Times reported on a Department of Justice pressure campaign to oust him, Ryan sent a letter of resignation to the university’s Board of Visitors. By Friday, the board had accepted it. Ryan, who has served as UVa’s president since 2018, said he’d leave the post by August 15.

• Quotable: “I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University,” wrote Ryan in his resignation letter. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”

Put simply: Republican critics of higher ed have bagged another scalp. Ryan joins a list of high-profile presidents and presidential candidates, including Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and most recently Santa Ono, who have been brought down by well-orchestrated, media-savvy pressure campaigns.

The common thread is easy to spot: an argument that prestigious colleges are too woke, and their leaders bear the blame. At UVa, Ryan oversaw plans to drastically increase the number of students and professors of color, remove Confederate tributes from campus, and allocate $950 million to racial-equity efforts.

• In 2023, as diversity efforts came under fire nationwide, he argued in The Chronicle Review that “colleges should continue to promote the core elements of DEI” but must “take the criticisms of DEI seriously — and do more to explain our efforts.”

UVa has largely wound down its diversity apparatus. After a March directive from the Board of Visitors, it abandoned its enrollment and hiring goals and dissolved its central DEI office. The state of Virginia has not passed laws banning diversity programs at public institutions. But President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders provided the impetus, even though they’d been blocked in court at the time.

Still, critics weren’t satisfied. Members of the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group founded by alumni, had long decried UVa’s investment in DEI work as discriminatory and expensive. Now, they argued — in a campaign that included social-media messaging and local newspaper ads — that Ryan was slow-walking the university’s response to the board’s mandate.

The council didn’t reach a wide audience, but it reached the right audience: the feds. Two Department of Justice lawyers, both UVa alums, took up the charge to take Ryan down:

• Harmeet K. Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She signed an April letter demanding that UVa produce proof that it had eradicated all traces of DEI.
• Gregory W. Brown, Dhillon’s deputy, has ties to the Jefferson Council. He demanded “on several occasions” that UVa remove its president as a condition of closing the department’s investigation, according to the Times.

Brown makes no bones about jumping into the fray. Shortly after Ryan stepped down, he posted a selfie on X. He’s smoking a victory cigar. The caption: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the Virginia motto.

We already knew that the Trump administration is eager to prosecute local causes célèbres:

• Its review of a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Washington came on the heels of extensive local television coverage.
• Its investigation of transgender-bathroom policies at Western Carolina University was prompted by conservative-media coverage of a student video.

But calling for the head of a campus leader — without pointing to a concrete instance of misconduct — is new territory. The red- or purple-state public-college presidency is already a politically fraught role. If the feds are able to apply pressure, it gets much messier.

Consider the context in Virginia. When Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, replaced former Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, in 2022, he appointed a slate of conservatives to UVa’s board. The new board members shared a goal — and the sense of an executive mandate — to hold institutional feet to the fire. Ryan may have had the faculty and administrative support to stand athwart that goal. But once those board members found allies in the alumni ranks and the federal government, the center couldn’t hold.

The big question: Is UVa doomed to be a political football? Democrats and Republicans are already squabbling over Youngkin’s attempt to place Kenneth Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general and Trump-administration official, on the UVa board. The search for Ryan’s successor could raise the stakes — especially with Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, leading in the polls to replace Youngkin when his terms ends in November.

📱 Read more from The Chronicle‘s Kate Hidalgo Bellows: UVa President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration
🤿 How’d we get here? Go deeper with Kate and Katie Mangan: Is DEI Truly Dead at UVa?

Federal news

• Plan B for some of Harvard’s international students: Students at the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will be able to study at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy should student-visa restrictions prevent them from returning to the United States in the fall, according to a joint statement by the two institutions. The Trump administration is seeking to revoke Harvard’s right to enroll foreign students. A district-court judge temporarily blocked the effort this month; the Trump administration has appealed that injunction. (Reuters, The Harvard Crimson)
• Workforce Pell struck from budget bill: A provision to expand Pell Grants to students in short-term workforce programs was removed from Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget bill Thursday after it was rejected by the Senate parliamentarian. Critics of the proposal said it could drive dangerous growth in unaccredited credential programs, but the measure had bipartisan support. (Inside Higher Ed)
• Tax-endowment exception out, too: Also rejected by the parliamentarian: a carve-out that would have exempted religious institutions, including Hillsdale College, from an income tax on the wealthiest colleges’ endowments. Small colleges had lobbied for several exemptions that would mitigate the impact of endowment-tax hikes. (The Hill, Politico, The Chronicle)
• Challenge to trans admissions at Smith College: A conservative advocacy group has filed a civil-rights complaint with the Department of Education, arguing that the college discriminates by admitting transgender women but not transgender men. “I think this is a unique claim,” said a scholar of gender history. “They’re testing the waters for them going after others.” (The Boston Globe)

Quick hits

• Layoffs coming to Stanford: The university will cut its operating budget by $140 million for the coming academic year, according to a message from the president and provost to faculty and staff. Some staff positions will be eliminated, a staff hiring freeze will continue, and the pace of faculty hiring “may be somewhat slowed,” the leaders said. (Stanford U.)
• U. of Washington shelves plan for “innovation district”: The university has decided not to build the first of a planned 19-building agglomeration of academic and private research facilities and offices next to its Seattle campus. The building project, a partnership with the real-estate developer Wexford Science & Technology, would have cost roughly $282 million. University leaders teased layoffs and requested that all units trim their budgets amid deep federal and state cuts. (The Real Deal)
• Athletics out at two institutions: A $45-million cash infusion from the state of California to Sonoma State U. includes $8 million earmarked to restore athletic programs. But university leaders say that money will support “long-term funding solutions” for athletics, rather than reviving any of the 11 teams the university eliminated in January budget cuts. Meanwhile, Bryn Athyn College of the New Church, near Philadelphia, will cut all 11 of its athletic programs. The college has fewer than 300 undergraduates and has been warned by its accreditor. (SFGate, The Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Last-minute leadership change at Carroll College: Less than a week before he was to take the helm of the Catholic college in Montana, William Ruud announced that he was “stepping away to focus on personal matters.” The college has appointed two interim co-presidents — Jennifer Glowienka, senior vice president for academic affairs, and Austin Vetter, Bishop of the Diocese of Helena, to share the role for the coming academic year. (Daily Montanan)

Quote of the day

“He’s not the guy who is going to lead us into the great battle for democracy. He’s not Lincoln.”

—Steven D. Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard University, on Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber.

As the leader of the university’s resistance to the Trump administration’s escalating demands, Garber has become something of a folk hero to observers across higher ed. He’s a pragmatic leader and a good listener, Levitsky said, but he hasn’t been trained to stare down the regulatory apparatus of the federal government.

Now Harvard and the feds are back at the negotiating table. Some faculty at the university are hopeful for a resumption of research activity and international-student enrollment. But others are concerned that any deal Harvard makes might sacrifice its independence and ideals.

Read more from The Chronicle’s Francie Diep and Eric Kelderman: What Would a Deal Between Harvard and Trump Mean for Higher Ed?

Transitions

• Sandra Bulmer, dean of the College of Health and Human Services at Southern Connecticut State University, has been named interim president.
• Larry Johnson Jr., president of the City University of New York Guttman Community College, has been named president of CUNY’s Bronx Community College.
• Barb Roberts, associate vice president for enrollment management within the Office of Academic Affairs at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has been named acting senior vice provost for academic affairs.
• Jeff Snow, vice president for university advancement at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, has been named executive vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement at Augusta University.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.

Footnote

The students who trekked out to the Wyoming badlands last month for the College of Charleston’s annual Dinosaur Expedition may have done so with visions of vertebrae dancing in their heads. That’s what you usually find on trips like these: broken ribs, teeth, and other Cretaceous-era ephemera.

Instead, they came back with a rather extraordinary find.

Scott Persons, the professor of paleobiology who led the expedition, set the scene in a college news release: “Tired, hungry and in need of a shower, most of the field team was wilting.” But not Monika Angner, a senior geology major who was hiking just ahead of the pack. “Monika shouted: ‘Dr. Persons, I think I found something big!’ Well,” Persons recounts, “I could hear the excitement in her voice.”

Big indeed. Angner had come upon a remarkably well-preserved mosasaur specimen — its skull nearly intact, its neck, back, limbs, and tail “all fully articulated,” as Persons put it. In case you haven’t recently watched Jurassic World, or taken a grade-schooler to the natural-history museum, a mosasaur is an enormous aquatic lizard, roughly the size of a school bus. Graft the head of an alligator onto the body of Champ, and you’re in the ballpark.

A creature this big (probably more than 25 feet long) and old (about 70 million years) requires lengthy and painstaking excavation. But Persons and Angner did safely ferry the mosasaur’s two-foot-long skull back to Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History, where they’ll continue to clean and examine it and divine what they can about the lizard.

They do already know one thing: its nickname. It’s customary for the person who discovers a big-deal specimen to decide what it will be called while the excavation and study plays out. Angner got the honors, and she decided to pay tribute to her big sister. So this fearsome predator, sharp-toothed scourge of the Cretaceous seas, will henceforth be known as ... Jillian.