Having led the University of Virginia for nearly seven years as its president, it all came down to this: walk away from the job, acceding to political pressure, or risk inviting hellfire on the university he loved. For the then-58-year-old administrator the choice was excruciating. And time was running out.
Earlier that morning, on June 26, The New York Times had reported that, amid a slew of federal investigations accusing UVa of violating civil-rights laws through various diversity initiatives, Department of Justice lawyers were pressuring Ryan to resign. Ryan had no idea who had leaked the story, but it underscored the indisputable gravity of the moment. If Ryan tried to stay on the job, he’d been told, the university risked losing millions of dollars in federal research funding. If he resigned, he’d been made to understand, the problem would essentially go away. But there were other stakes to consider. To fold now would be to submit to a federal pressure campaign that threatened the autonomy of a storied public university — one that had been founded more than 200 years earlier by Thomas Jefferson.
The story of the four critical hours that led to Ryan’s resignation, and the intense days and weeks that preceded them, are laid out in a 12-page letter that Ryan released on Friday to the university’s Faculty Senate. His account — first reported in The Chronicle — sheds new light on a high-stakes showdown that has been unfolding for months between the University of Virginia and the Trump administration. It invites an interpretation that a small cadre of board members seized on an intense political moment to oust Ryan for their own purposes, gaslighting him into believing he had no choice but to go. But it does something more sweeping, too. Ryan’s telling offers the most detailed and compelling personal account to date of what it’s like to lead a high-profile research university during Donald Trump’s second term as president — a confusing and distrustful era in which every day feels like a battle for the soul of higher education.
As Ryan put it, “The whole episode still feels surreal and bewildering, and I still cannot make complete sense of it.”
In the ensuing weeks, UVa began receiving letters from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which had pointed questions about whether university leaders were abiding by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively banned race-based affirmative action in admissions. Letters from the DOJ piled up, and UVa hired outside lawyers to deal with the pile. With each new letter pronouncing an investigation, lawyers advised Ryan and his team that they should respond all at once in a comprehensive way, rather than dealing with each one piecemeal. Understandable, perhaps, but optically problematic: UVa looked to some like it was dragging its feet or hiding something.
Accounts differ about what happened next, pointing to what appears to have been an eroding and contentious relationship between Ryan and several members of the Board of Visitors, specifically Rachel Sheridan and Porter Wilkinson, both Youngkin appointees who were soon to hold positions of leadership as rector and vice rector, respectively. According to Ryan, the two members told him they had been invited to meet with the Justice Department lawyers who’d been flooding the university with inquiries. He wrote that he offered to meet with the department lawyers, too, “but was told by Rachel and Porter that that would be supremely unpleasant and would likely lead to a bad outcome.”
Ryan and Sheridan have offered different accounts of whether he wanted to go to the meeting. What’s significant in hindsight, though, is that Ryan’s information about pressure from the government was always filtered through other people. His absence from conversations with the primary government lawyers, Gregory Brown and Harmeet Dhillon, has contributed to the deeper mystery about what kind of federal ultimatum the university faced regarding his leadership.
According to Sheridan, the department “lacked confidence in President Ryan to make the changes that the Trump administration believed were necessary.” Absent “a different course,” Sheridan wrote in her own account, the department “would expand its investigations into additional issues, subject other personnel to scrutiny, and pursue the cutoff of federal funding.”
Ryan, Sheridan, and Wilkinson did not respond to emails on Friday requesting interviews.
On this much Ryan and Sheridan agree: She told him that the government lawyers were unhappy with him and that his staying on could do great damage to the university. But Ryan seemed to be the person most interested in the larger signal his resignation might send. Was it best for UVa, he asked Sheridan, to let “the federal government decide who gets to be president of the University of Virginia?”
From outside lawyers to the ascendant board leaders, Ryan seemed frequently unsure of whom he could trust. He “was constantly butting heads” with the board, and he was already thinking about whether the upcoming academic year should be his last. Unspoken in Ryan’s account, but hard to ignore, is how much UVa had come to be shaped by its conservative alumni during his presidency. A group known as the Jefferson Council has in recent years become a source of vocal and loyal opposition to the university’s more progressive-minded notions, arguing that even campus tours have gotten too “woke.”
Ryan had shared some of his misgivings about the board, and even his desire to step down before his contract concluded, with Paul Manning, a board member whom Ryan describes as “a friend.” But Manning had told him to hang in there. An election was coming. A Democratic governor seemed like a real possibility, and the politics of the board would shift with new appointments.
On June 16, Ryan met Manning for lunch at the board member’s request. The friend who’d been telling Ryan to tough it out had a new message: Ryan should resign. That’s what the governor was saying. That’s what Sheridan was saying, too, according to Ryan’s recounting of the lunch.
(Efforts to reach Manning on Friday were unsuccessful.)
Again, Sheridan’s account diverges from Ryan’s here. Rather than being the one who was whispering to Ryan’s friend that the president should step aside, Sheridan says that she had learned from Manning that Ryan was planning his own exit.
“Rachel responded by saying that was ‘such a law professor question,’ which was not meant as a compliment,” Ryan wrote. “I was trying to get them, with little success, to appreciate the value of the principles at stake and the cost of sacrificing them, even if that cost couldn’t be easily quantified.”
Another lawyerly point was on Ryan’s mind. Where was the rest of the board? Beyond Sheridan, Manning, and Wilkinson, the circle of knowledge about Ryan’s dilemma seemed awfully tight. Even the board chairman at the time, Robert Hardie, seemed largely in the dark about the details, Ryan wrote. Ryan was twisting in the wind, he wrote, and “a decision by board members not to do anything to prevent this was a decision all the same.” Yet, no one was talking about it, much less voting on it.
Reading Ryan’s account, it’s hard not to think of Teresa A. Sullivan’s ordeal from 13 years earlier. As president of UVa, Sullivan was forced out in 2012 by a small cadre of board members, whose actions were so widely condemned by alumni and governance experts that Sullivan was soon reinstated.
“The strategy of leveraging a small portion of the board to misrepresent itself as some sort of larger force on the board is a clear echo,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of modern media studies at Virginia.
Sullivan, in an interview on Friday, said the parallels didn’t feel precisely analogous to her experience. “In my case, there was no involvement of the federal government,” she said. “It was a lot less overtly partisan, which this seems to be.”
At some point during Ryan’s ordeal, Sheridan offered Ryan what was described as a lifeline. The embattled president should talk with Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer with a UVa degree who had worked on high-profile cases involving Microsoft and the NFL. Wilkinson, Sheridan said, was “a friend of hers,” who could tell Ryan “what it might look like for me personally if we tried to fight against the federal government,” Ryan wrote.
Ryan’s conversation with Wilkinson on June 24 appears to have been a moment of recognition: He was on an island. Wilkinson wasn’t there to help Ryan weigh his options, he surmised. She was the board’s lawyer, and she was making a closing argument “focused solely on persuading me to resign.”
“The conversation continued to be tense, and at one point Beth told me that I was going to be kicked out one way or the other, and that if I didn’t resign, the board would fire me,” Ryan wrote.
What if he didn’t go quietly? Well, Wilkinson fired back, maybe they’d fire him for cause and strip him of his tenured faculty position, too.
Wilkinson did not respond to an interview request.
By this point, the story, to Ryan’s mind, had become entirely about his status as president. UVa wasn’t going to go to the mat against the Trump administration. They were offering him up. “At no point did Rachel or Paul even hint that we should try to fight the DOJ,” he wrote.
Ryan worked his connections. Maybe a former board member who was plugged in in D.C. could find something out. Was this a bluff? Manning, the board member whom Ryan had described as a friend, reached out to Justice Department lawyers for answers, too. “He said that they told him that if I didn’t resign, they would ‘bleed UVA white.’”
As described, such threats from the federal government are sending shivers down the collective spine of higher education, which is growing accustomed to well-heeled universities making concessions few could have imagined before the past year.
“People who care about the future of an independent U.S. higher-education system must take seriously the authoritarian aims of the federal government,” said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education at the University of Delaware.
“I was repeatedly told that 5 p.m. was the point of no return,” Ryan wrote.
And he was sworn to secrecy, too.
“The call for my resignation, right until the end, seemed so outlandish as not to be entirely believable,” he wrote. “It also felt like a hostage situation, where the kidnapper threatens harm if you do not keep information about the demands confidential.”
In exchange for this pound of flesh, UVa was being offered what Sheridan described as “an amazing deal,” Ryan wrote. The university would effectively get “blanket immunity,” all investigations would be suspended, and no financial penalties would be extracted or research funding compromised. The catch? Ryan couldn’t see it in writing, ostensibly for fear of another news leak. To this day, though, Ryan can’t say whether there was a written deal before he resigned. And the agreement UVa entered into, which suspends investigations but subjects the university to ongoing monitoring, isn’t the kind of deal he said was described to him. And many faculty are furious about the terms.
In the fallout from Ryan’s letter, UVa’s Faculty Senate met on Friday. They passed a resolution, calling on Sheridan and Wilkinson to resign immediately from the board.
Ryan’s account strongly suggests that he believes Sheridan wanted him out, going so far as to hire “a lawyer to persuade me to resign, without informing me or the rest of the board.” He expresses doubts that the government ever truly required his resignation, citing statements from Dhillon, the government lawyer, that denied such an ultimatum.
“Someone is obviously not telling the truth,” he wrote.
In her account of June 26, which differs in some details from Ryan’s telling, Sheridan describes being taken aback by the government’s demands that Ryan resign forthwith.
“President Ryan was shaken by the DOJ’s response, as was I,” she wrote.
Even after hearing of the “amazing deal,” Ryan equivocated. The deadline was unreasonable. This couldn’t be happening. But reality began to set in. “One of my closest and wisest colleagues said: ‘If you don’t have any board support, it’s over. You can’t fight this on your own,’” Ryan recalled.
About 30 minutes before the deadline, Ryan tendered his resignation to Hardie, who had just three days left as rector. He struggled to believe even then that it was really over. Surely the full board, once informed, wouldn’t accept it. Surely they wouldn’t hand over their authority so readily.
But they did.
Kate Hidalgo Bellows and Nell Gluckman contributed reporting.
