The Back Story of Ryan’s Resignation Is Complicated
by James A. Bacon
The U.S. Department of Justice sent seven letters to University of Virginia officials seeking confirmation that the University had ended racial preferences and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) in the lead-up to President Jim Ryan’s resignation, according to documents released to the Washington Post and Cavalier Daily under the Freedom of Information Act.
The first letter, sent April 11, asked for admissions data to ensure that the University was complying with last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the use of race in university admissions. An April 28 letter addressed complaints that the university administration had failed to comply with a March 7 order by the Board of Visitors to dismantle DEI.
The letters showed how DOJ asked for increasingly comprehensive information and revealed the growing frustration of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and her deputy Greg Brown at the lack of response. They warned that a failure by the university to take “immediate corrective action” could lead to punitive steps, including possible termination of federal funding.
“Time is running short, and the Department’s patience is wearing thin,” stated the final letter, dated June 17.
Ryan resigned June 27.
UVAophiles will find both articles worth consulting. The Cavalier Daily provides the full text of the letters. The Post’s reporting provides some illumination of the behind-the-scene maneuverings leading up to Ryan’s resignation.
None of the letters called for Ryan to be fired. But according to the Post, based on two anonymous sources, DOJ officials demanded Ryan’s resignation after the June 17 letter. Dhillon has denied the claim. Rather, she told CNN, she told the university’s governing board that she didn’t have confidence in Ryan’s ability to follow the law and said significant money was on the line.
Reports the Post:
The university had been crafting a response, preparing binders of information related to the federal inquiries and its proposals to comply with the U-Va. board’s resolution, according to three people familiar with the school’s planning.
School officials sent the information to board leaders and the school’s lawyer, the people said, as the Justice Department sent new letters with more asks. But board leaders said the material could not yet be sent to the Justice Department as they tried to figure out how to address the additional requests.
Among the people helping to guide the university’s response to the Justice Department were Sheridan, then the chair of the audit, compliance and risk committee; Porter N. Wilkinson, the committee’s vice chair; and the board’s legal counsel, Farnaz Farkish Thompson, a McGuireWoods lawyer with expertise in higher education, according to people familiar with the matter. …
As pressure mounted on the university, DOJ officials told U-Va. on June 26 that Ryan had until the end of the day to resign, two people familiar with the matter said.
That evening, more U-Va. board members started learning of the severity of the issue when, one by one, they received calls about Ryan offering to step down.
The Post quotes another anonymous source as saying that Governor Glenn Youngkin did not play a hands-on role. Interestingly, the Post account mentions no involvement of University Counsel Cliff Iler, whose legal guidance, one would think, would have been critical in a crisis of this magnitude. Rather, the board had engaged its own in-house counsel — a first.
DOJ gave the University multiple opportunities to respond to its requests for information. It repeated its requests and warned that there would be repercussions for a failure to provide answers. What’s not clear is why UVA failed to respond other than to ask for deadline extensions.
Faculty senate chair Jeri K. Seidman defended the administration’s actions. “This feels like a manufactured crisis,” she told the Post. “The board asked us to dismantle our DEI office, but plans for that dismantling were never approved by the board, so the administration could not respond to DOJ inquiries.”
Seidman’s defense of Ryan’s actions — that the BoV had not approved a plan for dismantling DEI, so the administration could not respond — was seemingly confirmed by three Post sources (unless Seidman was one of the anonymous sources, in which case, by only two other sources). If this is an accurate portrayal, UVA’s lack of responsiveness to DOJ can be attributed not only to Ryan but the board.
If accurate, it might be unfair to assert that Ryan “stonewalled” DOJ, as I have suggested in past columns. Subsequent revelations might confirm that characterization, but based on what the public now knows, it’s simply not clear who was in charge and who was responsible for keeping DOJ informed of UVA’s intentions.
Indeed, it appears — but we don’t know for a fact because governance at UVA has been so opaque — that the board sidelined Ryan as DOJ ratcheted up the pressure. The board issued its order to dismantle DEI and end racial preferences on March 7, and told Ryan to report on his progress in 30 days. UVA scrubbed its websites and abolished the central DEI office and DEI positions but kept former DEI employees on its payroll. Ryan’s 30-day report to the board, though never made public, was deemed unsatisfactory by many board members. In its next meeting on April 9, the board reversed a 2020 board vote to adopt the recommendations of the Racial Equity Task Force, which formed the basis for much of UVA’s DEI policy, and increased its oversight over work done to ensure civil dialogue and intellectual diversity.
As the conflict between DOJ and UVA ground on, it can be seen how Dhillon and Brown responded to the internal UVA power dynamics. In their letters, they first went through normal administrative channels… then brought in Rector Robert Hardie… and then dealt directly with Rachel Sheridan, who by then had emerged as the dominant figure on the board. Sheridan had been voted rector, effective July 1. In an assertion of her authority, she also pushed through her pick for vice rector, Porter Wilkinson, in a split vote over another board candidate.
It appears that by June 16, both Ryan and his lame-duck ally Hardie, who would step down in two weeks, were relegated to secondary roles, as seen in the list of the recipients to whom the seven DOJ letters were addressed.
April 11: Cliff Iler (University Counsel)
April 18: Iler
April 28: Ryan, Hardie, with copy to Iler
May 2: Ryan, copy to Iler
May 22: Ryan, Hardie, with copy to Iler
June 16: Sheridan, with copy to Farnaz F. Thompson (outside counsel). The letter was addressed to Sheridan as “rector” even though she would not officially assume that position until July 1.
June 17: Sheridan, with copy to Thompson
(Interesting sidebar: It appears that women were calling the shots at this point: Sheridan, Wilkinson, and Thompson, who heads the higher-ed practice group for the McGuire Woods law firm. Thompson was described to me as a “brilliant” attorney who helped write the Title IX sexual harassment Final Rule 85 on sexual harassment in 2020 while working in the Trump administration. There’s a girl-power angle for legacy media to jump on!)
The major question at this point is whether DOJ initiated the idea of firing Ryan. Two anonymous sources say it did, Dhillon said publicly that she didn’t.
My working hypothesis is that something like this happened: DOJ told board members that Ryan was unresponsive to its information requests and was putting UVA’s federal funding at risk. At some point, Sheridan began functioning as the de facto rector and took over negotiations with the feds. She asked how to resolve the situation. Presumably, Ryan was involved but had squandered credibility with Youngkin-appointed board members, who were frustrated by his foot dragging in implementing the board’s DEI mandate. Unwilling to see the Trump administration pull hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, board members (at least those consulted by Sheridan) decided Ryan had to go. What then proceeded were negotiations over the terms, conditions and timing of Ryan’s departure.
To repeat: This is conjecture based on limited facts. I will revise the narrative as more information becomes available.
Another thing that remains unclear is the role that Ryan himself played in the drama. “I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” he said in a letter announcing his resignation, noting the DOJ’s claims were “distinctly tied to me personally.” The statement implies that he still had the authority to continue the fight if he had chosen to.
Ryan’s allies on the left have begun crafting a narrative of him as a martyred victim of the Trump administration. There is not enough information to reach that judgment. At some point, Ryan did become the flashpoint. But he could have saved his job had he chosen to comply with DOJ’s initial information requests and had he cooperated more fully with the Board over the dismantling of DEI. For whatever reason, he did neither, and he lost the confidence of the board.
Incidentally, UVA announced yesterday that Ryan will officially step down July 11, take a sabbatical, and return to UVA to teach at the schools of law and education.
