The president of Virginia’s flagship university is leaving, pushed out by the Trump administration.
The actual facts available are few. Let’s review what little we do know, then focus on what we don’t know.
The background: President Donald Trump came into office vowing to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and started on day one by signing the first in a series of executive orders. Over the coming weeks, multiple colleges in Virginia moved to eliminate their DEI offices. They may not always have moved enthusiastically, but their boards did vote to do so. The University of Virginia Board of Visitors — by then dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin — voted March 7 to do away with its DEI office and instructed President James Ryan to report on the progress. The key part was this:
RESOLVED FURTHER, the University’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships is hereby dissolved; and RESOLVED FURTHER, the University shall immediately transfer permissible programs to a new organizational home ...
What followed was a running debate over which programs were “permissible.” As The Washington Post reports: “Critics argued Ryan simply tried to rebrand DEI initiatives as other programs rather than eradicate it from the university, which said it was complying with the resolution by cutting the DEI office.”
In April, the Department of Justice sent letters to the school asking for details — specifically on what had happened to each position that had previously had some DEI responsibilities. The Washington Post called this “highly unusual.” Of note, the two DOJ lawyers who sent the letters — Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gregory Brown — are both UVa grads.
Some conservative alumni began to clamor for Ryan’s ouster. In the past few days, it came to light that the Trump administration was pressuring Ryan to resign — the department would launch a civil rights investigation that would risk the loss of federal funding if he didn’t resign. On Friday, he did so. In an email to “the university community,” Ryan said: “I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”
The political reaction was swift, and predictable. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., called it “unprecedented” and “extremely disturbing that two mid-level functionaries” could force a university president to resign. John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, issued the pithiest statement about Ryan’s departure: “Good riddance to him and DEI.”
Anyone who had anything to say (and some didn’t) agreed on at least one thing: This is a big deal.
To some, this is part of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to bring academia to heel. To others, this is simply a sign that he’s serious about fulfilling a campaign promise to do away with DEI. Commentators across the political spectrum will have plenty to talk about there. Here are some other important aspects that might deserve some attention.
1. A governor can’t fire a college president, yet apparently midlevel federal appointees can.
Virginia law has attempted to insulate state colleges from politics to the extent that’s possible. Each state school is run by a board of visitors — our archaic name for a board of trustees. They’re the people who hire and occasionally fire college presidents. Those visitors are appointed by the governor — with General Assembly confirmation — but those terms are staggered. When governors come into office, those boards are full of people appointed by his or her predecessors. Not until the past year, closer to the end of Youngkin’s term than the beginning, do we have college boards where a majority of board members are his appointees.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that state colleges ought to be more politicized. I’m not saying I agree with that, just that the argument exists. Given how many millions we spend on them, maybe they should be more directly accountable to our elected officials. That’s not the system we’ve designed, though. Rightly or wrong, our universities are supposed to sit outside the political system. When then-Gov. Ralph Northam worked behind the scenes to ease out the superintendent of Virginia Military Institute in 2020 — his chief of staff sent word to Binford Peay that the governor had lost confidence in him — it created an uproar because Northam had bypassed the board of visitors. At least there, Virginians had elected Northam and we knew who to hold accountable if we didn’t like the decision. Here, we have two obscure federal lawyers forcing a college president to quit.
Let’s try to set aside the immediate politics of how we may feel about DEI if we can; is it wise to have a system where the midlevel federal appointees can do what a governor can’t — or at least shouldn’t?
The fact that the legal threats to UVa came from UVa grads within the Department of Justice doesn’t engender confidence. Instead, it raises the prospect that they might have had some other grievance against their alma mater and simply used their position to take revenge on the president, who has served since 2018. If these letters had come from Attorney General Pam Bondi, the political questions about federal involvement above would be the same but we wouldn’t have to speculate as to motive.
2. This would look better if the board of visitors was more involved.
The process here is irregular, at best.
Imagine an alternative scenario: The Justice Department tells the UVa board “here are the bad things we’ve found or the bad allegations we plan to investigate.” If the board had then demanded or strongly suggested that Ryan step down, we could still debate DEI if we wanted to, but we’d have less reason to question the process. If a college president loses the confidence of his or her governing body, then the president should go. Period. That’s how the org chart works.
Instead, not even a Republican-dominated board told Ryan it was time to go — that we know of. Some members may have wanted him to leave, but there was never a board vote. Instead, this looks like something the Trump administration did, not something the Youngkin-appointed board did. This either a) makes the board look weak or b) makes the Trump administration look arbitrary or c) both. That feeds into this:
3. Ryan’s resignation shouldn’t ‘resolve’ the basic allegations.
The letters that the Department of Justice sent to the University of Virginia aren’t public, so we’re forced to rely on how they’ve been characterized by those who have seen them. The New York Times — which first broke this story — has reported that “the department informed the college of multiple complaints of race-based treatment on campus, and of the government’s conclusion that the use of race in admissions and other student benefits were ‘widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution.’” The Times also reported that the Department of Justice had demanded Ryan’s resignation “as a condition to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices.”
This raises questions, and not just about the use of federal power. If the department believes that civil rights violations have taken place, shouldn’t it continue to pursue those whether the president is still there or not? If Ryan’s resignation brings the federal inquiry to an end, that suggests it wasn’t really a fact-finding mission but a scalp-seeking one. The only way to avoid these unfortunate impressions is a full report on what DOJ has found.
4. Research universities are especially vulnerable because of federal research funding.
Ryan, in his resignation statement, referenced “the researchers who would lose their funding.” Kaine, who felt so strongly about the matter that he interrupted his day to hold a Zoom conference call with Virginia journalists, said he heard the amount at risk was about $400 million.
Every school is going to be entangled with federal funding somehow — student loans, for instance — but research universities are especially tied to federal dollars. A big university today is no longer a cloistered “academical village” as Thomas Jefferson imagined; our modern economy has turned research universities such as the University of Virginia into economic engines. Closer to home for many Cardinal readers is Virginia Tech. Why is Tech important? Yes, it educates a lot of students and, yes, it’s a major employer and yes, it’s got sports programs that people cheer for. Its real economic value, though, is the research its faculty and students conduct — some of which results in spinoff companies. In threatening to withhold those funds, the Trump administration is threatening the economy it says it wants to grow — but the administration also knows that few universities short of Harvard can afford to risk that funding, so this a very effective threat to make. Universities think they are immune from political pressure but they’re finding they’re not — not as long as we have an administration willing to exercise its muscle in a way previous ones haven’t.
5. This is going to become part of the governor’s race.
Of course this is going to be a political issue — it ought to be. We’re talking here about a state university, run by a board whose members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the General Assembly. What happens at state universities is a matter of state policy. The question is who this helps and who this hurts. We won’t know that for sure until the night of Nov. 4.
My best guess now is that this helps Democrats more than Republicans. It’s always easier to motivate voters to be against something than for something. This gives Democrats another reason to motivate their base to be against Trump — and to use this fall’s Virginia elections as an opportunity to express their opposition. Democrats were quick Friday to pump out statements denouncing this “outrageous” and “shameful” “infringement upon academic freedom” (to quote a greatest hits of Democratic news releases). By contrast, Republicans — other than Reid — were silent on the subject.
In 2021, Virginia Democrats were hurt because their turnout didn’t change much from four years prior while Republican turnout surged. In Charlottesville, turnout four years ago was lower than it had been in the previous gubernatorial election — not what Democrats needed in an overwhelmingly blue city. Turnout in other university cities was also pretty meager. If Democrats have any life in them, I suspect they’ll be able to use this to ramp up turnout in those places this fall: If Trump can do this to the University of Virginia, he can do this to you, too. What we don’t know is how this will play with Republican voters. The initial silence from most Republicans doesn’t suggest that this is something they want to be associated with. Ironically, given the success that Republicans have had with DEI as an issue, they ought to be the ones pushing for a full report on UVa in hopes it gives them something else to run on.
6. This sets a precedent; how will it get used?
Conservatives today might be cheering this (I know some certainly are). However, the same mechanism that allows the Trump administration to do this now would also enable some future Democratic administration to do the same, just from a different side of the political ledger. Imagine some future Democratic president who issues an executive order that requires every college in the country to have, oh, let’s say a gender studies program or an LGBTQ studies program — and let’s imagine a school in some conservative state that balks or slow-walks implementation. Could that president’s Justice Department then force the university president to resign? This would seem to be a precedent that an aggressive future Democratic administration could use in ways that Republicans would very much regret.
7. What would Thomas Jefferson think?
Few stories on the University of Virginia can pass without a reference to its founder. It’s also always dangerous to guess what some historical figure might think about a modern situation, especially someone like Jefferson, who sometimes gets claimed by both parties. (He’d probably be horrified by both.) Here’s a quote from Jefferson that might apply to this situation; you can decide how: “I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”
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