Update: Friday, 2:26 p.m. We’ve posted our updated story on the Jim Ryan resignation:
UVA President Jim Ryan resigns: Making sense of something that doesn’t make sense
Update: Friday, 1:29 p.m. The New York Times is reporting that UVA President Jim Ryan has submitted a letter of resignation to the UVA Board of Visitors.
We’re working on a follow-up report, with the analysis below serving as background.
First report: Friday, 11:51 a.m. The Trump Department of Justice has been scheming behind the scenes to pressure UVA President Jim Ryan to resign, citing what officials there believe is Ryan’s slow walking of the dissolution of the school’s DEI programs.
That the scheme is now public knowledge means the effort isn’t going to work, for reasons that will become obvious as you read along.
First, to the details of the DOJ effort, which, according to reporting from The New York Times, is being led by a pair of UVA alums, Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Harmeet K. Dhillon, a civil-rights lawyer in the department.
Just to give you a sense of what Ryan has been up against here:
Brown’s name might be familiar because he is also a partner at a Charlottesville law firm, Brown & Gavalier, which took UVA to court on the side of a White alum who was found guilty of threatening fellow students by the student-run University Judiciary Committee after she was accused of saying protestors at a Black Women Matter protest would “make good speed bumps.”
And then, Dhillon, prior to her work with the MAGAs, got herself a headline in the UVA Law alumni mag for representing a Google employee in a suit arguing the company “discriminates against Whites and Asians, men and employees whose political views are unpopular.”
The pressure from these folks on Ryan would seem to be an 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 case for a finding under either (a) or (b) begins with the UVA Board of Visitors vote in March to dissolve 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 noted in an April 28 letter that the school had yet to follow through on the dissolution, 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.”
That the news here is the DOJ is trying to pressure Ryan to quit might be your indication that the MAGA-majority Board of Visitors, which has had its sights on cutting Ryan’s term short ahead of the 2025 gubernatorial election, thinks it needs outside help to achieve that aim.
The BOV could, without outside help, fire Ryan “without cause,” but that would come with a hefty price tag – one year at his annual base salary of $750,000, plus six months of vested sabbatical leave that would cost another $375,000, and on top of that, Ryan would retain tenured faculty status.
Granted, it’s hard to imagine that it’s just $1 million-plus that would be keeping the MAGAs from cutting bait on Ryan; the board members could pass a hat around the table and come up with a million before ordering sandwiches and tea for lunch.
More than the dollar cost, firing Jim Ryan comes with political and PR costs.
Which is why I imagine what’s going on behind the scenes is, the board has been using the UVA alums in the Justice Department to pressure Ryan to take a buyout, sign an NDA, and have the matter go silently into the night.
That was, that is, until The New York Times stuck its fat nose into the matter.
Seems to me that we’re back to, the BOV either fires Jim Ryan, or it stands down.
He’s not going to quit, not with a Democratic governor a few months away from being a reality.
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Chris Graham
