The University of Virginia drew national headlines last summer when its then-president, Jim Ryan, resigned in the face of a Department of Justice investigation into a potential pattern of civil-rights violations by the university. More recently, Ryan and others have accused the UVA board of conspiring to push him out.
It’s amusing that Ryan would try to turn his DOJ ouster into a whodunit. Just last week, UVA board member and donor Paul Manning affirmed that he told Ryan it would be “[Ryan’s] decision” whether to resign. Manning simply told him that hanging onto power might cost the university federal funding.
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As Manning’s letter makes clear, the true story has been hiding in plain sight. Public statements by members of the Board of Visitors tell the same story. Manning and Rachel Sheridan, the board’s current rector, indicate that they believed that the university was in real danger of losing federal funding. No one, including Ryan, seems to contest this fact.
Anyone familiar with the DOJ’s punitive deals with Northwestern, Cornell, Brown, and Columbia knows the cost of getting crosswise with the DOJ. It was clear that the DOJ didn’t believe Ryan would bring the university into compliance. He had been president since 2018, and DEI practices had festered on his watch.
Ryan himself requested that Sheridan, Manning, and counsel ask the DOJ about his plan to resign, according to Sheridan's account. He sent a letter of resignation to then-Rector Robert Hardie (a Democratic appointee) in late June. Afterward, Ryan penned an account of his resignation that is both paranoid and glib about real problems at UVA. He accused Sheridan of excluding him from the initial meeting with DOJ attorneys and hinted that Manning pressured him to quit. He even suggests that the demand for his resignation may have been a coordinated scheme orchestrated by board members, UVA’s outside counsel, or Governor Glenn Youngkin.
Rather than take responsibility for the fact that his institution had drawn a federal investigation, he conjures a shadowy cabal plotting his ouster. But the only cabal at work was the DEI apparatus that Ryan failed to dismantle.
Ryan appears unable to concede that the DOJ’s concerns were likely justified. Near the end of his public letter, he writes: “Too often, people within the DOJ and on our own Board have implied that if we were following policies that they did not favor, we were somehow doing something illegal. . . . We were committed to following the actual law.”
This assertion is suspect, given his administration’s embrace of racialist practices. Under his watch in 2020, the UVA’s Racial Equity Task Force implemented a nearly $1 billion plan that would, among other things, dramatically strengthen racial preferences in admissions and faculty hiring. According to a 2023 study by the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene, UVA had a uniquely massive DEI bureaucracy, with 6.5 DEI personnel for every 100 faculty. It had the second-largest DEI apparatus, proportional to its faculty, of any public university in America.
Ryan’s record makes it unsurprising that the DOJ would doubt his commitment to correcting problems stemming from DEI at the university. When a compliance agency uncovers pervasive issues in any organization, the first and most natural question is whether the chief executive should go.
Even Ryan’s own close confidante, former UVA counsel Tim Heaphy, disclosed in a recent moment of candor that he “can’t say that every person that [Ryan] hired” supported equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. He added: “I do think the University historically has had some programs that crossed the legal line.”
Heaphy later released a letter trying attempting to clean up his candid remarks. Instead, he dug himself and his former boss into a deeper hole, highlighting the apparent fact that Ryan—UVA’s president for nearly seven years—had not completed the work of going “department by department” to identify potential violations of federal law. UVA rector Rachel Sheridan has noted that since receiving letters from the DOJ beginning in April, the university has “identified hundreds of policies and websites that have needed changes to ensure that they correctly and clearly conform to the law.”
In other words, Ryan failed to address ongoing issues until he “learned” of them (in Heaphy’s phrasing) from the DOJ. When you’re the president of a major university and you discover credible civil-rights concerns in your own backyard only because the Department of Justice alerts you, you’ve failed in your most basic duty as a leader. It’s time to go.
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