U-Va. President Jim Ryan tells board he'll resign amid DOJ pressure
University of Virginia President James E. Ryan has told the school's governing board he'll resign amid pressure from Justice Department officials over diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a person familiar with the situation said. A second person said the DOJ officials had previously indicated to Ryan they'd like him to step down.
The extraordinary move comes as the Trump administration has launched investigations into universities to achieve its policy goals. That included a probe at U-Va. over its DEI policies.
The move was first reported by the New York Times.
Ryan began at U-Va. in 2018.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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San Francisco Chronicle
34 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
University of Virginia president, pressured over DEI, resigns rather than 'fight federal government'
WASHINGTON (AP) — The president of the University of Virginia, facing heavy pressure from conservative critics and the Trump administration over the school's diversity, equity and inclusion practices, announced Friday that he was resigning rather than 'fight the federal government.' The departure of James Ryan, who had led the school since 2018, represents a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration's effort to reshape higher education. Doing it at a public university marks a new frontier in a campaign that has almost exclusively targeted Ivy League schools. It also widens the rationale behind the government's aggressive tactics, focusing on DEI rather than alleged tolerance of antisemitism. Ryan had faced conservative criticism that he failed to heed federal orders to eliminate DEI policies, and his removal was pushed for by the Justice Department as it investigated the school, according to a person who was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. Ryan referenced the Trump administration pressure in a statement to the university community Friday in which he said he had submitted his resignation with a 'very heavy heart.' 'To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University,' he said. 'But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my job.' Ryan had already decided that next year would be his last, he said, and remaining in his position until then would be 'knowingly and willingly sacrificing this community.' The New York Times first reported on the resignation and the Justice Department's insistence on it. The Justice Department declined to comment Friday. Ryan's removal is another example of the Trump administration using 'thuggery instead of rational discourse,' said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents. 'This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,' Mitchell said. 'It's clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.' Virginia's Democratic senators react In a joint statement, Virginia's Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan's resignation over ''culture war' traps.' 'This is a mistake that hurts Virginia's future,' Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine said. After campaigning on a promise to end 'wokeness' in education, Trump signed a January action ordering the elimination of DEI programs and 'radical indoctrination' across the nation's schools and universities. The Education Department has opened investigations into dozens of colleges, arguing that diversity initiatives discriminate against white and Asian American students. The response from schools has been scattered. Some have closed DEI offices, ended diversity scholarships and no longer require diversity statements as part of the hiring process. Some others have rebranded DEI work under other names, while some have held firm on diversity policies. The University of Virginia became a flashpoint after conservative critics accused it of simply renaming its DEI initiatives. The school's governing body voted to shutter the DEI office in March and end diversity policies in admissions, hiring, financial aid and other areas. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin celebrated the action, declaring that 'DEI is done at the University of Virginia.' Among those drawing attention to the Charlottesville campus was America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller. In a May letter to the Justice Department, the group said the university failed to dismantle DEI programs and chose to 'rename, repackage, and redeploy the same unlawful infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms.' The group directly took aim at Ryan, noting that he joined hundreds of other college presidents in signing a public statement condemning the 'overreach and political interference' of the Trump administration. On Friday, the group said it will continue to use every available tool to root out what it has called discriminatory systems. 'This week's developments make clear: public universities that accept federal funds do not have a license to violate the Constitution,' Megan Redshaw, an attorney at the group, said in a statement. 'They do not get to impose ideological loyalty tests, enforce race and sex-based preferences, or defy lawful executive authority." Ryan has been leading the school since 2018 Ryan was hired to lead the University of Virginia in 2018 and previously served as the dean of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Earlier in his career he spent more than a decade as a law professor at the University of Virginia. A biography on Harvard's website credits Ryan with increasing the 'size, strength and diversity' of the faculty, adding that building a diverse community was a priority. Robert D. Hardie, leader of the University of Virginia's governing board, said he accepted Ryan's resignation with 'profound sadness,' adding that the university 'has forever been changed for the better as a result of Jim's exceptional leadership.' Until now, the White House had directed most of its attention at Harvard University and other elite institutions that Trump sees as bastions of liberalism. Harvard has lost more than $2.6 billion in federal research grants amid its battle with the government, which has also attempted to block the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status. Harvard and its $53 billion endowment are uniquely positioned to weather the government's financial pressure. Public universities, however, are far more dependent on taxpayer money and could be more vulnerable. The University of Virginia's $10 billion endowment is among the largest for public universities, while the vast majority have far less. ___
Washington Post
40 minutes ago
- Washington Post
The DOJ just forced out UVA's president. It's time to take a stand.
Regarding The Post's June 27 online news article 'U-Va. president tells board he'll resign amid Trump administration pressure': It is hard for me to tell whether I am more disturbed by the Trump administration's decision to pressure James E. Ryan to resign as president of the University of Virginia to punish the school for Ryan's dedication to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion or by Ryan's resignation.
Politico
44 minutes ago
- Politico
Trump's big Supreme Court win has three significant loopholes
For Donald Trump, it was a 'monumental victory.' For the Trump resistance, there are signs of hope buried in the fine print. Those dueling interpretations emerged Friday in the hours after the Supreme Court issued its blockbuster decision in Trump's challenge to three nationwide injunctions that have blocked his attempt to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born on American soil. And both contain an element of truth. The 6-3 decision has a single headline holding: Federal district judges 'lack authority' to issue 'universal injunctions,' Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the conservative majority. It's a breathtaking pronouncement given that district judges, with increasing frequency, have been issuing those sorts of injunctions for decades. It was precisely the bottom-line result that Trump's Justice Department asked for in the case. Sweeping injunctions have blocked many of Trump's second-term initiatives, not just his executive order on birthright citizenship. Now, the Supreme Court has made clear, an injunction against a challenged policy should ordinarily apply only to the individuals or organizations who sued. For everyone else, the policy can take effect even if a district judge believes it's likely illegal. But Barrett's 26-page opinion leaves a surprising degree of wiggle room. Yes, conventional nationwide injunctions are off the table, but Trump's opponents say they see alternative routes to obtain effectively the same sweeping blocks of at least some policies that run afoul of the law and the Constitution. The court appeared to leave open three specific alternatives: Restyle the legal challenges as class-action lawsuits; rely on state-led lawsuits to obtain broad judicial rulings; or challenge certain policies under a federal administrative law that authorizes courts to strike down the actions of executive branch agencies. The viability of these three potential alternatives is not yet clear. But the court explicitly declined to rule them out. That led Justice Samuel Alito — who joined the majority opinion — to write a concurrence to raise concerns that the court was leaving loopholes that could undercut its main holding. If lower courts permit litigants to exploit those loopholes, Alito wrote, 'today's decision will be of little more than minor academic interest.' Legal experts were unsure about the practical implications of the ruling — especially in the birthright citizenship cases, but also in other challenges to Trump policies. 'One of the things that's problematic about this decision is how difficult it will be to implement,' said Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia law professor whose scholarship was cited in the justices' ruling. 'I think it's really hard to say.' The court's decision explicitly left open one avenue for legal challengers to obtain a broad ruling that can apply to thousands or even millions of people: File a class-action case. Class actions allow large groups of similarly situated individuals to band together and sue over a common problem. If a judge sides with class-action challengers against a federal law or policy, the judge can issue a binding order that protects everyone in the class from being subject to the law or policy. Within hours of the court's decision on Friday, one of the groups challenging Trump's birthright citizenship policy moved to refashion its case as a class action. But class actions are not a panacea for the Trump resistance. Federal rules require special procedures before a court can 'certify' a class. Litigants seeking to use the class-action mechanism must meet several criteria that don't apply in ordinary lawsuits. And the Supreme Court itself has, in recent years, raised the legal standards for people to bring class actions. Barrett wrote that these heightened requirements underscore the need to limit universal injunctions, which she labeled a 'shortcut' around the stringent standards that accompany class-action suits. 'Why bother with a … class action when the quick fix of a universal injunction is on the table?' she wrote. Alito, in his concurrence Friday, warned district judges not to be overly lax in green-lighting class actions. 'Today's decision will have very little value if district courts award relief to broadly defined classes without following' procedural strictures, the conservative justice wrote. A second potential silver lining for Trump's opponents is that the court recognized that states may sometimes be entitled to broader injunctions than individual challengers. Barrett wrote in the majority opinion that district judges are empowered to provide 'complete relief' to litigants who are improperly harmed by government policies. And when states sue the federal government, it's possible, legal experts say, that 'complete relief' requires a sweeping judicial remedy. That remedy might take the form of an injunction that applies everywhere in the suing states. Barrett herself contemplated that it might be proper for lower courts to forbid Trump from applying his executive order on birthright citizenship anywhere within the states that have challenged the order. (About 22 Democratic-led states have done so.) That scenario would create an odd patchwork: Automatic birthright citizenship would apply in half the country but would disappear in the other half until the Supreme Court definitively resolves the constitutionality of Trump's executive order. There is even a chance that 'complete relief' for a state might extend beyond the state's borders and apply nationally — because residents of one state frequently move to another. Still, the bounds of what the court meant by 'complete relief' remain murky. Frost said that it's unclear what an injunction that affords 'complete relief' to a state, while stopping short of a 'universal' or 'nationwide' remedy, would look like. 'I don't know, and that's a problem of the court's own making,' she said. Nonetheless, Democrats like New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin seized on the 'complete relief' opening, saying it was a reason for optimism and effectively an endorsement of what he and other blue state officials had contended since the start. He and other Democratic attorneys general emphasized that they argued at all levels of the court system the need for nationwide relief in the birthright citizen case — because it would be pure chaos if residents left one state where they were entitled to birthright citizenship and moved to another state where they were not entitled to it, or vice versa. 'As I sit here now, as it relates to states, the court confirmed what we thought all along. Nationwide relief should be limited but is available to states,' Platkin said. Barrett, however, wrote that the court was not taking a firm position on the scope of any injunction the states might be entitled to. 'We decline to take up these arguments,' she wrote, adding that the lower courts should assess them first. The third potential workaround for opponents of Trump policies involves a federal statute known as the Administrative Procedure Act. That law authorizes lower courts to 'set aside' actions by regulatory agencies if the courts find the actions to be arbitrary, rather than based on reasoned analysis. That sort of wholesale judicial relief in some ways resembles a nationwide or 'universal' injunction, but Barrett wrote in a footnote that the court's decision does not address the scope of relief in lawsuits filed under the APA. Some of the lawsuits challenging Trump's policies have been brought under the APA. For instance, a district judge in Rhode Island issued a nationwide injunction against Trump's attempt to freeze vast amounts of federal spending after the judge found that the move would violate the APA. But not all policies are agency actions that would be subject to APA challenges. The birthright citizenship policy, for instance, was promulgated through an executive order, not through any federal agency. On the other hand, the order has a 30-day 'ramp-up period' in which agencies will develop guidelines before implementing the order. Those guidelines might become targets for APA challenges.
