Jim Ryan, in a note to the University of Virginia community that went out Friday afternoon, explained his decision to step down as the president of UVA, saying he did so because “I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”
Ryan, the president of UVA since 2018, had been a clear political target of Glenn Youngkin’s Board of Visitors, whose MAGA members had been plotting his removal for the past year.
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?
In the end, it was pressure from Trump’s Justice Department, which raised issue with the Ryan administration’s efforts to dissolve UVA’s DEI office, that would help the Board of Visitors achieve its ends.
The BOV had voted in March to order Ryan to close the office, and two UVA alums in the DOJ, buttressed by a MAGA legal group founded by Trump henchman Stephen Miller, a Duke alum, advanced the claim thereafter that UVA, under Ryan, hadn’t done enough to meet the terms of an unconstitutional Trump executive order issued earlier this year banning DEI in higher education.
Fighting back against the political pressure from the Trumpers “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,” said Ryan, who noted in the email to the UVA community that he had decided privately that he wanted to step down as president of UVA next year, “for reasons entirely separate from this episode, including the fact that we concluded our capital campaign and have implemented nearly all of the major initiatives in our strategic plan.”
“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,” Ryan said.
“If this were not so distinctly tied to me personally, I may have pursued a different path,” Ryan said. “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.”
ICYMI
To clarify, it wouldn’t have been Ryan, if he were to have stayed on, who would have been causing “real and direct harm” to anybody at UVA.
“The fact that the federal government would get in and decide that it should micromanage who the president of UVA is, is just, frankly, shocking,” U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters on a conference call on Friday.
Abigail Spanberger, a former congresswoman who is the Democratic Party nominee for governor in the 2025 cycle, and a UVA alum, called the resignation of Ryan “a loss for the University of Virginia and the Commonwealth.”
“That the president of a top-ranked, thriving public university would be pressured to resign by the Department of Justice, in order to avoid further harm and harassment from the Trump administration, is a clear infringement upon academic freedom and should concern every Virginian and American,” said Spanberger, a clear favorite in the 2025 governor’s race, who would have the ability to radically change the makeup of the UVA Board of Visitors next year, if elected.
She’s clearly aware that she would have that power.
“As governor, I will 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 on Friday.
That promise to “take decisive steps” from Spanberger could make it hard for the current UVA Board of Visitors to find a full-time replacement for Ryan, against the strong possibility that a new board with a working Democrat majority could be in place as early as next January, if the 2025 election cycle plays out as expected.
I don’t know that the Youngkin stooges thought that out ahead of time.
The MAGA governor, who softened the racism inherent in opposing DEI initiatives in his 2021 campaign for governor by wearing a red vest, is trying to put on a brave face on what his side thinks it has achieved.
“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 a statement on Friday.
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Chris Graham
