Dhillon Defends DOJ Pressure on UVA
by James A. Bacon
The Department of Justice (DOJ) tried for three months to get answers to questions about the University of Virginia’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program but never received a substantive answer, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights division told CNN news anchor Jake Tapper.
“They didn’t respond at all?” Tapper asked yesterday on his cable news show.
“They asked for extensions and extensions and extensions,” Dhillon replied.
Dhillon said she’d sent a “sheath of letters of increasing urgency” asking UVA to confirm that it was compliant with Students for Fair Admissions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbidding racial discrimination in university admissions. They didn’t reply, she said. “Today, they still haven’t, almost three months after I started writing letters to the university law school, the medical school, the nursing school, and others. So, that’s really troubling.”
“I haven’t gotten anything in writing from UVA, unlike many of the other institutions of higher learning,” she said. “I’ve had chancellors come meet me. I’ve had lawyers come meet me. They’ve given us reams and reams of documents. Not UVA.”
Dhillon’s interview represented the first explanation to the media of DOJ actions prior to the UVA President Jim Ryan’s resignation yesterday. Ryan said he had been planning to retire in a year — a fact not generally known — but stepped down early rather than fight the DOJ and imperil UVA’s federal funding and putting other peoples’ jobs in jeopardy.
The Trump administration threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants if UVA failed to comply with federal civil rights law. The University of Virginia (including its health care division) receives $1.3 billion in federal funds from 18 federal agencies, Dhillon said.
Tapper asked if Ryan’s resignation was part of what DOJ was demanding in order to settle its investigation of racial preferences and DEI at UVA.
“I wouldn’t agree with that,” she said. “I did express to leaders at UVA that we significantly lacked confidence at the Department of Justice that Jim Ryan, given his ongoing public statements, and his participation in groups talking about suing the Trump administration to avoid having to do exactly what we were requiring them to do. I don’t have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of DEI.”
Ryan was one of more than 250 college/university presidents (and the only one from Virginia) who signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities letter calling the federal government’s actions an “unprecedented government overreach” and “political interference.”
“I will tell you,” she continued, “that there’s a lot of money on the line here, and other schools have lost their federal funding for being unwilling to comply with federal law. It isn’t just Students for Fair Admissions. Title VII, Title IX, Title VI. We can’t be giving out billions of dollars to organizations and institutions that refuse to follow federal law. That’s irresponsible.”
Tapper also asked what evidence Dhillon had that applicants to UVA were subject to discrimination on the basis of race.
“After Students for Fair Admissions, where you would normally expect the rate of Asian admissions to go up, Asian admissions went down at UVA,” Dhillon said. “That’s one data point. We have troubling incidents of students with perfect grades at UVA seeking admission to UVA’s Comms [Commerce] program who were denied it on the basis of race. That’s the only explanation. Because people with lesser grades were admitted because they were African-American.”
Dhillon compared resistance to the dismantling of DEI and racial preferences nationally to Dixiecrats resisting the end of segregation.
Said Dhillon: “I grew up in the rural South. And in the rural South the Dixiecrats had a similar view to what we’re seeing on college campuses today, and by administrators, and by leaders like Jim Ryan, which is that I don’t care what the federal law is, I’m not going to comply with it. And the federal government got pretty aggressive in going in and saying, no, sorry, after Brown v. Board of Education you have to allow equal opportunity for all people in the United States. Schools have done that by using the shorthand of quotas, and the Supreme Court of the United States has now told us that’s not legal.”
In closing, she made the case that ending DEI would not harm “diversity” on college campuses.
“Students for Fair Admissions was brought by Asian students who were denied opportunities in admissions to Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other schools. … To me, the promise of America is equal opportunity for every individual, not groups or groupthink. Jim Ryan has built his academic career on what was then the academic vogue — DEI. Now it isn’t. It’s time for new leadership that’s willing to comply with federal law.”
“That’s the best thing for UVA,” concluded Dhillon, a graduate of the UVA School of Law. “I love UVA. I proudly have my law review and my degree on my wall in my office in the Department of Justice.”
