UVA president says he quit instead of fighting the US government

Janet Lorin and Gregory Korte, Bloomberg News on Jun 27, 2025

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University of Virginia President James Ryan said he quit instead of fighting the U.S. government amid a Trump administration probe of the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Battling President Donald Trump would have endangered “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,” Ryan said in a statement Friday.

“I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this university,” Ryan said, adding that he was already planning to step down next year for unrelated reasons. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”

Ryan’s departure from Virginia’s flagship university underscores the pressure on U.S. higher education from President Donald Trump, whose administration has scrapped federal funding for Harvard University and other schools and begun investigations of colleges for “race-exclusionary” practices. Harvard has twice sued the administration.

The New York Times reported late Thursday that the Justice Department had demanded Ryan’s exit as a condition of settling a civil rights investigation of the University of Virginia’s diversity practices.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said the Justice Department has a 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,” Dhillon, a graduate of the institution’s law school, said in a statement. “‘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.”

Ryan, the school’s ninth president, developed a reputation as a champion of diversity while drawing fire from conservative alumni and Republican board members for being “too woke,” the Times said. Ryan, who earned a law degree at the University of Virginia, took the reins at the institution in 2018 and previously served as dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“I thank President Ryan for his service and his hard work on behalf of the University of Virginia,” Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, said in a statement. “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,” he wrote.

In March, the governing board voted to abolish the school’s DEI office.

Youngkin this week appointed four new members to the board. They include a vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a former chief financial officer of Carlyle Group Inc., the private equity firm where Youngkin previously worked as co-chief executive officer.