UVA President Resigns Over Trump’s Anti-DEI Investigation
The Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in post-secondary education has resulted in several colleges removing courses, ending long-held graduation traditions, and outright shuttering departments focused on DEI. The attack on DEI has now resulted in the University of Virginia’s (UVA) president resigning from his role.
According to AP News, UVA President James Ryan attributed his resignation to an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice into the school’s DEI practices. “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 his resignation letter. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my job.”
UVA faced pressure to end its DEI initiatives not only from the Trump administration but also from the state government. UVAs governing board, with members appointed by Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, issued a mandate in March for the school’s DEI office to be shuttered and for DEI policies to be phased out in admissions, financial aid, and several other areas. Youngkin proudly proclaimed, “DEI is done at the University of Virginia,” in response to the mandate.
Ryan, who has been with UVA since 2018, had long been an advocate for DEI in higher education both during his time at UVA and during his previous tenure as dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. The Justice Department and several conservative activist groups believed Ryan never ended UVA’s DEI policies and instead simply renamed them.
The Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, told CNN on Friday he didn’t “have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of DEI.”
America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller, wrote a letter to the Justice Department critical of Ryan’s response to the anti-DEI mandate.
From AP:
In a May letter to the Justice Department, the group said the university failed to dismantle DEI programs and chose to “rename, repackage, and redeploy the same unlawful infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms.”
The group directly took aim at Ryan, noting that he joined hundreds of other college presidents in signing a public statement condemning the “overreach and political interference” of the Trump administration.
On Friday, the group said it will continue to use every available tool to root out what it has called discriminatory systems.
“This week’s developments make clear: public universities that accept federal funds do not have a license to violate the Constitution,” Megan Redshaw, an attorney at the group, said in a statement. “They do not get to impose ideological loyalty tests, enforce race and sex-based preferences, or defy lawful executive authority.”
It’s genuinely baffling that these people are talking about “ideological loyalty tests” when that is literally all they’re doing. What else would you call threatening the funding, jobs, and the accreditation of America’s universities should they not adhere to the Trump administration’s ideology?
UVA is just one of several schools that have been adversely affected by the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to make the softest, weakest, most mediocre white boys feel strong by making life harder for everyone else.
Harvard has borne much of the anti-DEI crusade, with the Trump administration trying (and failing) to prevent the school from admitting international students. It also threatened to withhold federal funds from any school found to have DEI initiatives, and launched a “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” in order to conduct ideological loyalty tests investigate schools it suspects are still continuing to implement DEI.
Ryan wasn’t even the first to lose his job over DEI, as the dean of students at UNC Asheville was fired after she was caught making pro-DEI comments on hidden camera. What makes Ryan’s resignation hit so hard for the education community is that he was pressured to do so by the president of the United States.
“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told AP. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”
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