A workers group is trying to organize resistance to the forced departure of UVA President Jim Ryan, and a faculty group is calling for an independent investigation into the role played by the UVA Board of Visitors into pushing Ryan out the door.
No, this ain’t over.
Not by a long shot.
“By no means should board members support this interference or, even worse, execute the politically motivated orders of federal bureaucrats,” Timothy Gibson, president of the Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors, wrote in a letter to the new rector of the Board of Visitors, Rachel Sheridan, a Glenn Youngkin appointee.
Gibson and the AAUP are raising issue with the actions of BOV members who “may have aided and abetted the Department of Justice’s political campaign against UVA and President Ryan.”
ICYMI
- UVA President Jim Ryan resigns: Making sense of something that doesn’t make sense
- Jim Ryan explains decision to step down as UVA president: ‘Real and direct harm’
The MAGA supermajority on the Board of Visitors had Ryan in its crosshairs for the past year, with an aim on forcing him out ahead of the November state elections, that self-imposed deadline being a recognition of the power that a new governor would have to remove the board en masse.
Abigail Spanberger, a former congresswoman who is the Democratic Party nominee for governor in the 2025 cycle, who called the resignation of Ryan “a loss for the University of Virginia and the Commonwealth,” would have the ability to radically change the makeup of the UVA Board of Visitors next year, if elected.
Spanberger, a clear favorite in the governor’s race, pledged in a statement on the forced departure of Ryan to “take decisive steps to ensure that all of our Commonwealth’s Boards of Visitors are composed of individuals committed to the mission of serving and strengthening our public colleges and universities.”
“I will work to restore a standard of leadership that puts academic excellence, Virginia’s students, and the strength of Virginia’s public colleges and universities ahead of any political agenda,” Spanberger said.
The issue that BOV members used to force Ryan out is DEI. The board voted in March to direct Ryan to close the school’s DEI office, to come into compliance with a Trump executive order of dubious constitutionality.
ICYMI
- UVA Board of Visitors does Youngkin’s bidding: ‘DEI is done at the University of Virginia’
- The MAGAs got Cedric Wins at VMI: Is UVA President Jim Ryan next?
The DOJ, specifically, a pair of UVA alums who work in the DOJ, Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Harmeet K. Dhillon, a civil-rights lawyer in the department. noted in an April 28 letter that the school had yet to follow through on the dissolution of the DEI office, giving UVA a May 2 deadline to come into compliance that was later extended to May 30.
A legal group founded by Trump’s Nosferatu, Duke alum Stephen Miller, that goes by the name America First Legal, claimed in a May 21 letter to the DOJ that UVA is still “operating programs based on race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, and other impermissible, immutable characteristics under the pretext of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’) in open defiance of federal civil rights law.”
In a May 29 statement, noted anti-vaxxer Megan Redshaw, a counsel at America First Legal, said UVA “has not dismantled its DEI framework – it has merely rebranded it to evade legal scrutiny. What the law prohibits, UVA simply renamed.”
The behind-the-scenes pressure from these folks on Ryan, first reported by The New York Times last week, was a clear attempt to make a case that Ryan could face termination “with cause” under the terms of his employment contract. Specifically, the exposure would come in clauses (a) and (b) under the “Termination” header, which would require a finding of “gross negligence or willful malfeasance by the President in the performance of his duties, which negligence or malfeasance causes substantial harm to the University,” or “actions or omissions by the President that are undertaken or omitted knowingly and are criminal or fraudulent and involve dishonesty or moral turpitude.”
The behind-the-scenes pressure, coupled with the public threats from the Trump administration to withhold federal funding if UVA didn’t comply with the dubious DEI executive order, finally forced the hand of Ryan, who explained in an email to the UVA community that he stepped down because he could not “make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”
“If this were not so distinctly tied to me personally, I may have pursued a different path,” Ryan wrote in the email. “But I could not in good conscience cause real and direct harm to my colleagues and our students in order to preserve my own position.”
Ryan, to be clear, has found himself coming under fire from both political directions in this divided era, both for his work to broaden the diversity of the University’s student and faculty populations, angering the right, and his actions to quell protests by pro-Palestinian demonstrators raising issue with the genocide in Gaza, angering the left.
The UVA chapter of the United Campus Workers of Virginia, which represents faculty and undergraduate and grad staff workers on Grounds, noted in an email to its members its support for Ryan, highlighting his work in DEI and academic independence, as the union also made clear that it didn’t agree “across the board” with everything Ryan has done in his tenure as president.
“This is our university, and we have the power,” the union wrote in the email, which announced an all-faculty town hall that will take place on Wednesday.
“Faculty are already in motion across the university,” the email from the union went on. “But without you stepping up to organize the resistance, a faculty town hall is as far as we’ll get, and we can be sure that our next president will be hand-picked by the same authoritarian forces seeking to spread the overreach deeper and further into our university. Now is the time to organize.”
To that point, I don’t know that things are going to proceed fast enough to get a new full-time president in place by the November elections.
ICYMI
- UVA leaders lay out how things will proceed with Jim Ryan’s pending departure
- Former UVA Board of Visitors member dunks on outgoing president Jim Ryan in radio hit
The Board of Visitors, just yesterday, laid out the process at play, and where we are now is the very beginning, with the first step being the appointment of Jennifer “J.J.” Wagner Davis, the executive vice president and chief operating officer, as the acting president upon the effective date of Ryan’s resignation, which is Aug. 15.
The next steps, then, are the appointment of a search committee for the full-time replacement for Ryan and the naming of an interim president, ostensibly, not Davis, a member of Ryan’s inner circle.
It’s not hard to assume that the search process for the full-time replacement is going to be hamstrung by the political reality of the looming gubernatorial election being just a few months away.
The MAGAs on the BOV almost certainly knew that their victory here was going be pyrrhic.
They just wanted their pound of flesh.
“The Trump administration wanted to wind back the clock and return the University of Virginia to a time when racism, sexism, and homophobia went unchallenged, and the benefits of higher education were limited to a privileged few,” Gibson, with the American Association of University Professors, said.
Consider their message sent, and received.
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Chris Graham
