Updated 9:45 p.m. June 27.
The University of Virginia president James Ryan said Friday he was resigning after the Justice Department demanded he step down.
“To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this university,” Ryan wrote in a letter to the campus community. “But 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 Justice Department has spent months quietly investigating whether the Virginia flagship complied with President Donald Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The Board of Visitors voted to dissolve the university’s DEI office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus. In many cases, critics argue that the university simply changed the names of programs but maintained their core function.
The New York Times first reported on the resignation and the Justice Department’s demand Thursday evening.
Ryan wrote that he had planned to step down next spring for reasons separate from the investigation; he didn’t say when his resignation would take effect.
“While there are very important principles at play here, I would at a very practical level be fighting to keep my job for one more year while knowingly and willingly sacrificing others in this community,” he wrote.
Robert Hardie, the chair of UVA’s board, said in a statement Friday evening that he accepted Ryan’s resignation with “profound sadness,” crediting him for leading the university “to unprecedented heights.”
Meanwhile, the Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni association that demanded Ryan resign, praised the decision as a “necessary and welcome step toward restoring intellectual diversity, depoliticizing the University, and commitment to equal treatment for all.”
Faculty, students and other demonstrators protested Ryan’s resignation Friday afternoon, accusing the government of overreach, according to local media. The university’s faculty senate condemned the Justice Department’s demands.
Ryan took over at UVA in August 2018, steering the institution through the aftermath of the deadly white supremacist rally in August 2017, the pandemic and the racial reckoning in 2020. He also cracked down on pro-Palestinian protesters last spring—a move that Republicans in the state backed but students and faculty condemned. Ryan also embraced institutional neutrality and sought to make UVA a leader in the study of democracy.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement Friday that the Justice Department welcomes “leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws.”
DOJ hasn’t said publicly what laws UVA allegedly violated, though Dhillon’s statement noted that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal discrimination in publicly-funded universities.”
From the early days of his second term, Trump has made a point of dragging elite, mainly Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities into the national spotlight and berating them for their supposed liberal ideologies and alleged antisemitism. But the investigation of UVA, a public institution in a state led by a Republican, represents a new front in the administration’s war against higher education—and so far Trump is succeeding.
Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, said Ryan’s resignation is a “major blow” to the independence of American institutions.
“It is a sign that major public research universities are substantially controlled by a political party whose primary goal is to further its partisan agenda and will stop at nothing to bring the independence of higher education to heel,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “It undercuts both the integrity of academic communities as self-governing based on the judgment of expert professionals and the traditional accountability that public universities have to their states via formal and established governance mechanisms.”
Legal experts who spoke with the Times struggled to recall other instances when the federal government has demanded a university board fire the chief official, saying it has only been done in the past over corporate criminal cases.
Robert Kelchen, an education policy professor at the University of Tennessee, noted that Ryan’s resignation portends a future in which all public university presidents must conform to the political views of their state’s leadership or risk being kicked out of office.
“Trump pushing James Ryan to resign at UVA is important, but it happened in part because VA’s governor is also Republican,” Kelchen wrote on BlueSky.
Virginia’s two senators, who are both Democrats, said in a joint statement that the demand for Ryan to resign “is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.”
“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,” wrote Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. “Decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance.”
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin thanked Ryan for his service to UVA in a statement Friday afternoon. Youngkin, a Republican, has appointed a majority of the university’s board members.
“The Board of Visitors has my complete confidence as they swiftly appoint a strong interim steward, and undertake the national search for a transformational leader that can take Mr. Jefferson’s university into the next decade and beyond,” he said in the statement.
A Quiet Inquiry
While the administration’s campaign against Harvard and Columbia mostly played out in public, the UVA investigation was quieter. The DOJ didn’t send press releases about UVA or make public hay about its demands. Instead it sent letters to the university about its inquiry and findings.
On April 28, DOJ cited complaints about how the university was handling its DEI programs, according to the Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Initially the letter set a compliance deadline of May 2. That was then extended to May 30.
After that, the DOJ received multiple complaint letters from groups like America First Legal, a legal advocacy group founded by Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, suggesting the university had yet to comply.
In a final letter, dated June 17, the department laid out its demands yet again, this time noting the complaints it had received from groups like AFL and saying that the university needed to make swift changes or pay the price, the Times reported. The government’s lawyers, who include several UVA alumni, found that UVA considered race in its admissions and in deciding other student benefits, according to the Times.
“Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” the letter said.
Neither the White House nor the DOJ have released a public statement about their demands of UVA or Ryan’s resignation.
The university said in a statement Friday morning that it is “committed to complying with all federal laws and has been cooperating with the Department of Justice in the ongoing inquiries.” But it has not said anything further since Ryan announced his departure.
