Glenn Youngkin inadvertently cajoled former UVA President Jim Ryan to go public with what really happened behind the scenes leading to his forced resignation in June, and it doesn’t look good on the lame-duck MAGA governor or his MAGA appointees to the UVA Board of Visitors.
“According to Paul Manning, the Governor knew what was happening and suggested I needed to resign. What did the Governor know, when did he know it, and what – if anything – did he do to try to either secure my resignation or prevent it?” Ryan wrote in a 12-page letter released on Friday, as a response to a letter that Youngkin wrote to the governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, raising issue with her advice to the BOV that it put the brakes on its search for a full-time replacement for Ryan.
ICYMI
I mean, seriously, Streisand Effect much?
To that point, FAFO much?
Maybe Youngkin, who thinks he has a political future, which he doesn’t, but anyway, maybe he shouldn’t have opened up this can of worms, to let us all see what was going on behind the curtain.
Don’t feel too bad for ol’ Glenn; his political career was already over, this just cements it, and he still has his $500 million net worth to keep him warm at night.
“I think it is time to set the record straight, which will hopefully enable UVA to make all necessary changes in order to end this chapter and begin a fresh, new chapter in the history of a remarkable university,” Ryan wrote in the lede to his letter, dated Nov. 14, and addressed to the UVA Faculty Senate.
The Paul Manning guy referenced above, a BOV member who Ryan described in his letter as a “friend,” is a Youngkin appointee to the Board who, according to Ryan, had been encouraging him to “hang on” as Ryan and the MAGAs on the Board of Visitors butted heads over the direction of the University, then changed his tune on June 16, advising Ryan over lunch that he thought Ryan “should resign,” in the face of the tensions between himself and the Board, and the extra pressure in the form of the Trump Justice Department investigation into the school’s adherence to the administration’s anti-DEI directives being led by UVA alums Harmeet Dhillon and Gregory Brown.
ICYMI
“Paul told me that he had heard from both the Governor and Rachel about the need for me to resign,” Ryan wrote, adding that he was “unclear to me whether this conversation was Paul’s idea, or whether he was carrying water for the Governor and Rachel,” the “Rachel” there being Rachel Sheridan, who is now the rector – i.e. the top leader – of the Board of Visitors, but she didn’t step into that role until July 1, two weeks later.
This was the beginning of what Ryan would realize later was the full-court press toward getting him to step down, with the MAGAs on the Board of Visitors using the confusing DOJ investigation as their wedge.
The confusing part to the Justice Department investigation was laid out in detail by Ryan in his letter; in a nutshell, the Justice Department kept moving the goalposts on what it was asking the University to do, and the lawyers working on behalf of UVA, two conservatives put in the job by the MAGA attorney general, Jason Miyares, gave the school what appears, in retrospect, to be suspiciously bad advice on how to handle the matter.
ICYMI
According to Ryan, Sheridan authorized, on behalf of the BOV, the hire of another lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, who met with Ryan on June 24; Ryan wrote that he thought the meeting would be to discuss Wilkinson’s experience working with Columbia University on its dispute with the Trump administration, but it became clear quickly that “she was focused solely on persuading me to resign.”
When Ryan refused to commit to doing that, Wilkinson “indicated that the Board might even try to fire me for cause if I did not resign”; a firing for cause would trigger provisions in Ryan’s contract that would “mean not just leaving the presidency but losing my tenured faculty position and being kicked out of the university altogether.”
Ryan wrote that he decided that night to tell the BOV that he planned to step down after the 2025-2026 academic year, and “suggested that Rachel convey that to the DOJ lawyers, thinking that this would be a reasonable solution.”
“They would know I was resigning, and I would be doing it on my own terms. It would also allow for an orderly transition,” Ryan wrote.
The next day, June 26, the New York Times published a story reporting that the Justice Department was pressuring Ryan to resign, and Ryan was called into a 1 p.m. meeting with Sheridan and the two outside lawyers approved by Miyares – Jack White and Farnaz Thompson; Thompson’s resume, incidentally, includes work on the Project 2025 document.
ICYMI
Per Ryan, he was told in the meeting that “the DOJ lawyers were very upset with the leaked story in the Times and that the only offer on the table was that I needed to resign by 5pm that day or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVA. I also needed my resignation to be effective prior to the students returning. If I did not resign that day, I was told that the DOJ would extract/block hundreds of millions of dollars from UVA before they would even negotiate.”
Ryan, after consulting with friends and colleagues, submitted his resignation at 4:30 p.m.
That move came at the end of a mentally and emotionally grueling period that Ryan described as feeling like “a hostage situation, where the kidnapper threatens harm if you do not keep information about the demands confidential.”
“I was repeatedly told to keep this threat confidential and scolded for sharing the information with some close colleagues to help me think through the best path. I worried that if I went public, UVA would lose funding and get attacked by the Trump administration, and I would still end up being fired or forced to resign regardless,” Ryan wrote.
Of note here: Ryan isn’t clear that the DOJ threat that was communicated to him by Sheridan and other BOV members was real.
“What is not clear to me, however, is whether the threat was real, or whether the idea came from the Board members who spoke with the DOJ lawyers, our own lawyers, the Governor, or some combination of that group,” Ryan wrote.
“The timing of this raises questions in my mind,” Ryan wrote. “The pressure to resign increased significantly in the second half of June. Robert Hardie stepped down as Rector on June 30, and Rachel Sheridan became Rector on July 1. What is unclear to me is whether those exerting the pressure were trying to ensure that my resignation occurred before Rachel became the Rector, so she would not have to be the one who formally accepted my resignation and the responsibility that comes with that.”
To that end, Youngkin wrote in his letter to Spanberger, as a defense of the actions of his appointees to the BOV, that Ryan’s resignation “took place under the leadership of Rector Robert Hardie, who was appointed by Governors Kaine, McAuliffe and Northam, and his resignation was encouraged personally by former Rector Rusty Conner, who was the rector during Jim’s hiring.”
“I have been advised that they persuaded former President Ryan to advance his previously planned resignation by several months because they believed he could not fully implement what they assumed would be included in the settlement agreement,” Youngkin wrote.
Being blunt here: not true.
Even as Ryan submitted his resignation to Hardie at 4:30 p.m. on June 26, Ryan recalled “thinking that it still might not be over, because there was a chance that the Board would refuse to accept my resignation.”
“Accepting my resignation, after all, would signal that the Board (or more precisely a small subset of the Board acting without authorization from their colleagues) was willing to give up perhaps its most important power and duty – to hire and fire the President,” Ryan wrote.
I’ll interject here: I mean, they got their way, right, and it was relatively bloodless, at least until Youngkin decided to get uppity about Spanberger telling the Board of Visitors to slow its roll on hiring a new UVA president.
Mr. One Governor at a Time seems to think he has a right to set the direction of the University of Virginia long into his slink back into private life.
Spanberger was just being helpful here; sure, the BOV can hire a new president, if its members’ hearts so desire, but Spanberger is going to put a new Board in place as soon after she takes the oath of office on Jan. 17 as she can, and it can start a process ASAP to lead to the hire of a replacement for whoever the current BOV would put in the job.
A new president wouldn’t move into Carr’s Hill until the end of the spring semester anyway.
I can’t be the only one with the sense that Youngkin’s issue with Spanberger’s letter to the UVA Board isn’t so much that reality, but maybe is more that he’s being succeeded by a woman who ran a campaign based on the theme of undoing everything he tried to do in his four years.
To wit:
“Your Administration will start on Jan. 17, 2026,” Youngkin concluded his mansplaining letter to Spanberger. “Until then, as I have told you, we will work closely and productively with you on your transition. If you wish to communicate ideas or seek information with officials in state government, your team knows the process to do so. It’s regretful that I must communicate to you in this manner, but your correspondence left no other choice.”
Funny here that his correspondence, then, left no other choice for Jim Ryan but to shovel the dirt on Youngkin’s political grave.
I’m already drafting the FOIA requests that I’ll be filing the afternoon of Jan. 17.
Should be a few months of fun, finding out what the Youngkinistas were up to the past four years.
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Chris Graham
