The former president of the University of Virginia said in a new account of his ouster that federal law enforcement demanded he quit “or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVA.”
The former president, Jim Ryan, released a letter on Friday recounting what happened leading up to his resignation earlier this year. The letter provides a window into how the Department of Justice has brought down the hammer on colleges over diversity, equity and inclusion — an explicit target of President Donald Trump’s White House — and has prompted calls to investigate what appears to be a law-enforcement pressure campaign.
Jim Ryan, who teaches law at UVA and served as the university’s president for seven years until 2025, said federal officials told him he must resign by 5 p.m. on June 26 to avoid consequences for UVA.
The school was under investigation for allegedly continuing to institute race-based DEI policies under a program by another name and refusing to turn over requested documents. Several months after Ryan stepped down, the university reached a deal with the DOJ to end the department’s investigations.
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Ryan said “a pattern evolved” while the DOJ was investigating the university in the spring. Prosecutors demanded answers about the student admissions process at some of its 12 schools, only to follow up later as time was running out with questions about another of its schools, he wrote.
“It is impossible for me to know, but the timing of the DOJ letters, the ever expanding scope of their inquiries, and their willingness to give us extension after extension made me wonder more than once if the DOJ was not actually interested in our response, perhaps because they showed — from what I saw — that we were complying with the law,” Ryan wrote.
Ryan described what amounts to a surreptitious pressure campaign over his role. He claimed that university board members without authority served as a go-between for UVA and the DOJ, which would not even allow Ryan to attend a negotiation in early June — forcing him to rely on secondhand information from colleagues. One of those colleagues said the DOJ threatened to “bleed UVA white” if the institution’s president didn’t resign, Ryan wrote.
At the time, conservative crusader Harmeet Dhillon, who as assistant attorney general for civil rights has overseen the Trump administration’s crackdown on academia, publicly warned that UVA was at risk of losing $1.3 billion in government funds from 18 federal agencies if it did not comply with the DOJ’s interpretation of the law.
In a CNN interview the day after Ryan’s resignation, Dhillon refused to characterize his departure as part of a deal to settle a DOJ investigation, instead saying that she told administrators “I don’t have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of DEI.”
“I think it is time for new leadership that’s willing to comply with federal law,” she said at the time on TV, noting that she still hangs her UVA diploma on the wall at her DOJ office.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ryan’s new allegations.
Ryan’s 12-page letter also touches on the political and administrative mechanisms that he suspects were at play behind the UVA–DOJ negotiations. He noted that one of the lawyers from the firm McGuireWoods — which was hired to conduct an internal university review ahead of the federal investigation — worked on Project 2025. Ryan’s claims raise questions about the roles of Virginia’s Republican governor and attorney general, Glenn Youngkin and Jason Miyares, in these affairs.
Youngkin boasted on Fox News in March that “DEI is done at the University of Virginia.”
On Friday, Virginia state Del. Katrina Callsen called Youngkin’s conduct in the matter “an atrocious betrayal of his duty.”
UVA’s interim president, Paul Mahoney, addressed the matter at the very start of a Faculty Senate meeting Friday afternoon. Mahoney recalled traveling to Washington and convincing Dhillon to drop two of the seven investigations, then making the difficult decision to abide by some of the DOJ’s terms to avoid the immediate risk of losing money and having to fire postdoctoral students, closing research labs and ending medical trials for sick patients.
The idea that UVA could fight the DOJ in court “without devastating consequences is, I think, pure fantasy,” Mahoney said.
One faculty member at the meeting, who did not identify himself, argued that the agreement was on its face illegal because it followed an unethical intimidation campaign to eject Ryan.
As news of the letter spread, legal scholars and political scientists at other universities called it “troubling” and “mafia governance in action,” and led to a call to “fire and disbar every DOJ lawyer involved with this.”
Dominique Baker, a University of Delaware professor who graduated from UVA and was later an assistant dean of admissions, called the letter “extremely alarming.”
“It suggests that the Department of Justice is trying to work with sympathetic actors at colleges in order to pressure the institutions to align them with the Trump administration,” she told NOTUS, calling it “some of the greatest political overreach we’ve seen since McCarthyism.”
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