Jim Ryan, the DEI-obsessed president of the University of Virginia, resigned from his post on Friday after the U.S. Department of Justice pressured him to leave.
Ryan resigned in the wake of the DOJ pushing for him to step down as part of its civil rights investigation into the school, which showed that UVA was attempting to hide its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) infrastructure and keep it operational in secret, violating the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for racial discrimination.
The resignation came as a condition to settle the civil rights investigation, and Ryan apparently had intended “to step down at the end of the next academic year,” according to The New York Times, which first reported the resignation.
“The United States Department of Justice has a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal discrimination in publicly funded universities. We have made this clear in many ways to the nation’s most prominent institutions of higher education, including the University of Virginia,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, a UVA alumna, said in a statement. “When university leaders lack commitment to ending illegal discrimination in hiring, admissions, and student benefits, they expose the institutions they lead to legal and financial peril. We welcome leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws.”
Dhillon and Ryan were both students at UVA’s School of Law at the same time.
As The Federalist reported, Ryan brought DEI to the university in a way never seen before, capitulating to Black Lives Matter dishonesty and bending the knee to race-baiting social justice combatants, leading one of the nation’s most historic universities to commit cultural and academic seppuku.
Despite a vote from the school’s Board of Visitors demanding that the UVA administration dismantle DEI, Ryan was slow-walking the process, rebranding instead of eradicating, and refusing to prove that the ideology was actually being dismantled when the Department of Justice requested that the university do so.
The Justice Department made numerous attempts to get UVA to comply and on June 17 warned the Board of Visitors that it needed to pick up the pace and informed them of several complaints involving race-based violations on its grounds.
The letter, signed by Dhillon and Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Gregory W. Brown, another UVA alumnus, said that using race was “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution” and that “time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” according to the Times.
According to The New York Times report, board members were worried that if Ryan did not step down, the school would risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding in line with threats from the Trump administration telling schools across the country to either comply with civil rights law or lose the money.
One of the Trump administration’s largest venues for reform in the United States is academia, where so many of the abhorrent social and cultural trends damaging America have come from: DEI, critical race theory, “transgender” ideology, attempts to erode the legacy of America’s founders (Ryan was dead set on trying to destroy Thomas Jefferson, the founder of UVA), and so much more.
The Jefferson Council, a prominent group of alumni, has been leading the charge for years to dismantle DEI, and in recent months, overtly called for Ryan’s resignation. On Friday, the group’s president, Joel Gardner, applauded the resignation.
“For too long, policies driven by ideology rather than merit, achievement, and character have eroded trust, divided the community, and betrayed the University’s founding ideals,” Gardner said. “President Ryan’s administration refused to dismantle illegal and discriminatory DEI programs and failed to uphold the core educational mission of the University.”
The Jefferson Council did much of the heavy lifting to prove DEI was still alive and well at the university.
Virginia’s two Democrat U.S. senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, were not happy with the decision, and attacked the “ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps” supposedly set by the Trump administration. But as The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson pointed out, the culture war is the primary battle worth fighting, and “our domestic political struggles are actually part of a much larger spiritual war over the fate of western civilization.”
Forcing out people like Ryan who have done so much to damage American culture is exactly the kind of thing President Donald Trump was elected to do.