The Trump administration has dramatically escalated its war on higher education, using the threat of withholding federal funding to force the resignation of Jim Ryan, the University of Virginia’s president of seven years.
The purported crime warranting this unprecedented demand? Not moving quickly enough to roll back the decades of progress the school has made in becoming a more diverse and welcoming environment to students, faculty and staff of all backgrounds.
The ninth president in the university’s history, Ryan has been an effective and highly regarded leader, shepherding the university through challenges and tragedies with a steady hand. Under his leadership, research funding and applications to the university have hit record highs, and it has maintained the highest graduation rates of any public university.
Today, UVA is ranked No.1 in the nation for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and No. 2 for best value among public universities, according to the Princeton Review. Ryan has made open dialogue about how to make the university better a hallmark of his presidency, welcoming good-faith input from across the ideological spectrum.
This legacy of thoughtful and effective leadership is now reportedly being muscled aside by a bad-faith act of stunning executive overreach. We must be clear-eyed about what it is to coerce an ouster under threat of financial ruin — it is an assault not only on UVA, but on the very principles of academic freedom, institutional autonomy and democratic governance.
There is no justifiable basis for this action. The move appears to be rooted in President Trump’s January executive order seeking to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public and private institutions across the country. The underlying demand, of course, is itself a staggering act of presidential overreach. Executive orders are not laws, and they are not royal decrees. They are strongly worded suggestions with force that stops at the borders of the executive branch. They are in no way intended to compel private or state entities to reorder themselves according to the preferences or whims of any one president.
Yet now the Justice Department seeks to usurp the independence and governance of both UVA and the Commonwealth that oversees it. In so doing, it is relying on a perverse reading of the laws of our country that treats any gesture toward a more inclusive society as ipso facto illegal, ignoring the plain meaning of American civil rights statutes and decades of case law. And in the process of pursuing its own rogue interpretation of those laws, the Justice Department is placing an overtly unconstitutional curb on both free expression and state sovereignty.
This is also a profoundly troubling sign the Trump administration is willing to sabotage American global leadership in pursuit of narrow political goals. Federal funds for higher education are not gifts or acts of charity. They are disbursed through grants and contracts that institutions often earn through fiercely competitive processes that have for decades played a central role in making American colleges and universities the envy of the world in research and academics. There could be few actions more short-sighted and self-defeating for the future of the country than taking a sledgehammer to higher education to flex power and impose a top-down ideology. Yet that is precisely what the Justice Department seeks to do here.
In the face of this threat, it is incumbent on leaders in Congress and in the Commonwealth of Virginia to stand up and speak. Regardless of political persuasion, Virginians and the American people should not and cannot tolerate any administration unconstitutionally seeking to bend the institutions that have made the country great to its will and ideology.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), the university’s Board of Visitors, and lawmakers across Virginia and the country must make it absolutely clear that it is unacceptable for American taxpayers’ money to be used as a cudgel or bargaining chip to cow our institutions into obeisance. As has already been seen through the Trump administration’s actions targeting other universities, failure to forcefully push back will only fuel more and more overreach.
In the earliest days of the republic, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that “public money and public liberty,” intended to be spread across the branches of government “but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them.” Cautioning the Virginia General Assembly to “look forward to a time” when corruption “will have seized the heads of government,” Jefferson continued: “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
The wolf is now at the door of the university that Jefferson founded. Those with the power to keep it out of the fold must speak now.
Ann Brown, who was a member of the University of Virginia’s first undergraduate co-ed class and a UVA law graduate, practiced commercial finance law for 45 years. Chris Ford, who graduated from Virginia’s Engineering School in 1987, has practiced commercial transactional law for major firms for over 30 years. They are Advisory Council co-chairs of Wahoos4UVA, a group of Virginia alumni, students, parents, faculty, staff and friends that formed to defend UVA from political pressure.
