University of Virginia President James Ryan has resigned amid a Trump administration investigation into his refusal to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
His Friday announcement caps a months-long effort to evade a January executive order from President Trump ending public funding for race-based assistance to Black, Hispanic and American Indian students.
The UVa. Board of Visitors voted in March to dismantle all DEI-based scholarships, hiring, admissions and programs. However, a subsequent Department of Justice investigation accused the school of rebranding the infrastructure and giving its staff new titles to keep doing the same work. The board accepted Mr. Ryan’s resignation on Friday.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, a UVa. alumna, told The Washington Times that Mr. Ryan resisted cooperating with the department’s “zero-tolerance policy toward illegal discrimination in publicly-funded universities.”
“We have made this clear in many ways to the nation’s most prominent institutions of higher education, including the University of Virginia,” Ms. Dhillon said. “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. We welcome leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws.”
America First Legal, a conservative legal advocacy group, sent Ms. Dhillon’s office a 98-page letter detailing UVa.’s noncompliance with federal policies.
For example, the letter noted that UVa.’s business school replaced its “Diversity and Inclusion” webpage with an “Inclusive Excellence” page while retaining a chief diversity officer to oversee race-based scholarships and programs.
In addition, the university’s liberal arts college UVa. Wise rebranded its “Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as the “Office for Advocacy and Opportunity” while maintaining requirements that faculty “address inequality and promote equity.”
The letter also noted that the UVa. School of Medicine continues to enforce a diversity policy requiring “active affinity groups” and “holistic approaches to recruiting, pipeline, admissions and hiring processes.”
“Any university president willingly breaking federal civil rights laws will be met with the full force of the federal government, and it would behoove every school in America to prioritize the civil rights of every student and end DEI once and for all,” said White House spokesman Harrison Fields.
The Times has reached out to the University of Virginia for comment.
Mr. Ryan told the Charlottesville public campus Friday that he acted to protect “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” if he stayed.
“To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University,” said Mr. Ryan, who has led the school since 2018. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”
Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both Virginia Democrats, said the Justice Department ultimately threatened to cut off funding to their state’s flagship campus unless Mr. Ryan left.
“It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan — a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward — over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” the senators said in a joint statement.
