“We’re gonna pull D.E.I. out by the roots, put Roundup in the holes, and plug the holes with concrete,” Bert Ellis told me in late July. The metaphor may sound hyperbolic, but the agenda is real. Ellis—a prominent donor to the University of Virginia—is a businessman and co-founder of the Jefferson Council, an alumni group that seeks to defend “free expression, viewpoint diversity, and academic excellence.”
By the summer of 2025, Ellis and his allies had achieved what once seemed unthinkable: on June 27, Jim Ryan, UVA’s widely respected president, resigned under pressure from both a university board shaped by the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, and by Trump’s new, MAGA-fied Department of Justice.
To casual observers, this may look like just another skirmish in the nationwide fight over D.E.I. But the real story is more Machiavellian—and much more consequential.
1. Choose an Enemy
Long seen as a moderate, even mildly conservative, institution, UVA was an improbable target for the MAGA right. Unlike Harvard and other Ivy League colleges now caught in the culture wars, the University of Virginia has long emphasized its Southern heritage and traditions.
Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and built with enslaved labor in Charlottesville, Virginia, UVA remained an all-male, predominantly white institution until 1970, when it began admitting undergraduate women. When I graduated, in 1992, 78 percent of its students were white.
In 2018, Jim Ryan—summa cum laude Yale graduate, first in his class at UVA Law, and a nationally respected legal scholar—left his role as dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education to become UVA’s ninth president. He had been offered the job shortly before the “Unite the Right” rally took place, in which white supremacists chanting Nazi slogans marched with flaming torches through Charlottesville. One counter-protester was killed and 35 others were injured when a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd.
Ryan said that he watched the violence unfold online as he was thinking about accepting the job. “The idea of running toward kept running through my mind,” he said, referencing those who had run toward the grisly aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing to help.
He brought this instinct for engagement to his presidency, working to ensure that UVA remained “a place that is open and welcoming to all.” In the years that followed, his ideals would drive sweeping gains for underprivileged and under-represented students—and help fuel the political tempest that would ultimately engulf him.
Under Ryan’s leadership, the university expanded access for low- and middle-income families while raising a record $6 billion in philanthropic support. In 2023, the university’s board approved a plan to cover tuition for in-state students from families earning less than $100,000—and the full cost of attendance for those earning less than $50,000. Today, about two-thirds of undergraduates complete their courses debt-free, and UVA ranks as the top public college for financial aid. The share of first-generation students has climbed to nearly 19 percent.
Ryan didn’t try to erase UVA’s past. He backed initiatives that publicly acknowledged the university’s dependence on enslaved labor in its founding and operations, while continuing to champion Jeffersonian ideals of free inquiry and civil discourse.
Still, Ryan’s presidency was not without controversy. In July 2020, a student named Morgan Bettinger was accused of making a threatening remark at a Charlottesville demonstration. (She told the driver of a garbage truck that was blocking the street, “It’s a good thing that you are here because, otherwise, these people would have been speed bumps.”) Although investigations conducted by the university’s Threat Assessment Team and Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights found no evidence to support the allegation, she was referred to UVA’s University Judiciary Committee, which is run by students.
She was found guilty of “threatening the health and safety” of university students and expelled in abeyance, meaning she was allowed to remain enrolled but received a demerit on her academic record. The decision drew criticism from free-speech and civil-liberties groups. In July 2023, Bettinger filed a federal lawsuit against the university. The complaint named 20 defendants, including Ryan and members of the university’s board, accusing them of retaliating against Bettinger for exercising her right to protected speech, and denying her due process.
In May 2024, another federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of Matan Goldstein, an Israeli-American student, who accused UVA of tolerating “virulent anti-Semitism” on university grounds. The complaint alleged that UVA’s leadership ignored reports of harassment and retaliated against students who spoke out, amounting to a systemic failure to uphold civil rights. Both lawsuits were quietly settled last year.
For critics, the episodes spoke to Ryan’s ideological overreach. For Bettinger and Goldstein’s attorney, Greg Brown—a 1989 UVA graduate and Charlottesville-based litigator—it was the start of a much more ambitious campaign against the university.
2. Falsely Accuse
In 2021, Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race. A former co-C.E.O. of the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, with a net worth of at least $500 million, The Washington Post described him as having “suburban dad appeal.” This was complemented by his loud campaigning against “critical race theory” being taught in public schools (despite the fact that it was not being taught in Virginia schools) and a pledge to rid educational establishments of their diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) initiatives.
Youngkin walked a careful line, accepting Donald Trump’s endorsement, but also distancing himself from the then former president. By doing so he managed to appeal to both the increasingly Democratic northern-Virginia suburbs and the more Republican rural counties. Upon winning, he swiftly moved to change the direction of the state’s flagship university.
He began appointing conservative alumni, such as Bert Ellis, to the board. In a 2023 CNN town hall, Youngkin announced, “We shouldn’t embrace equity at the expense of excellence.”
For much of its history, UVA’s board—known as the Board of Visitors—has upheld a veneer of bipartisan stewardship. The state’s governor appoints board members across the political spectrum incrementally over their four-year terms. It’s a tradition shaped more by custom than by law. That tradition is now over.
Two months after Trump began his second term, UVA’s board—now controlled by Youngkin’s appointees—voted unanimously on a resolution that eliminated the central Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships. Governor Youngkin triumphantly declared on Fox News: “D.E.I. is done at the University of Virginia.”
According to a source familiar with the process, a first draft of the resolution allegedly came straight from the governor’s office. But Ryan still had supporters on the board—including Robert Hardie, the rector (chairman) at the time—who realized the draft could not be practically or legally implemented in its original form. Therefore, the language was watered down. “It’s not clear that the [Youngkin-elected] board members who trumpeted its passage actually read the revised resolution,” says the source.
What they hadn’t read was that the final resolution directed that “permissible” D.E.I. programs should be immediately transferred to a “new organizational home” within the university. What “permissible” meant was never defined—neither in the resolution itself nor, according to another source with knowledge of the closed session, in the board’s discussion.
That omission would prove damaging to both Youngkin and the university.
(UVA spokesperson Brian Coy reached out to AIR MAIL after publication to clarify that the language for the resolution was “not provided by Governor Youngkin’s office,” although he conceded that it was “drafted in response to a letter from the Virginia Secretary of Education” that had been sent to all of the state’s public universities. The secretary of education is appointed by the governor.)
3. Be Aggressive
The ambiguity in the board’s resolution gave the university some internal leeway to preserve programs it believed were legally compliant. But it also created a vulnerability—one that outside actors were quick to exploit.
In March of this year, Greg Brown—who had filed the inflammatory federal lawsuits against the university—shuttered his Charlottesville law practice and joined the U.S. Department of Justice as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. He was to work under Trump-nominated attorney Harmeet Dhillon, herself a fellow UVA Law alum and former classmate of Jim Ryan’s.
Beginning in April, D.O.J. letters began arriving at UVA—seven in total through June—accusing the university of failing to dismantle its D.E.I. programs, failing to address anti-Semitism, and failing to comply with race-neutral admissions practices.
It began with two letters focused largely on procedural compliance, before shifting up a gear on April 28 and demanding that UVA certify “with precision and particularity” that D.E.I. programs had been dismantled.
However, by June the tone had grown noticeably more aggressive. In the final letter, dated June 17, the Justice Department stated, “Dramatic, wholesale changes are required, now, to repair what appears to be a history of clear abuses and breaches of our nation’s laws and our Constitution.”
This letter—signed by Harmeet Dhillon and Greg Brown—was the first to make explicit threats: “Continued refusal to obey the law” would be met with “the suspension, termination, or refusal to grant or continue UVA’s federal financial assistance.”
What could have caused the D.O.J. to unleash such an unprecedented and remorseless campaign against the university? The reason, multiple sources familiar with UVA board dynamics told me, may have been motivated by internecine Republican rivalry as much as anything else.
According to this theory, UVA’s alleged noncompliance with D.E.I. mandates offered a convenient way for supporters of J. D. Vance to politically damage Youngkin, whose 2021 gubernatorial victory had shown him to be a canny operator and a possible 2028 competitor for the Republican presidential nomination.
The ramping up in the D.O.J.’s language had seemingly been prompted by a deeply researched 98-page memo sent to the D.O.J. on May 21, by America First Legal—the conservative group founded by Trump adviser, and Vance ally, Stephen Miller. It accused UVA of circumventing D.E.I. bans, arguing that UVA was merely rebranding unlawful D.E.I. initiatives under euphemisms such as “inclusive excellence” and “community engagement.”
One theory is that America First Legal’s memo may have served a dual purpose: targeting Jim Ryan’s supposedly “woke” leadership of UVA as well as showing up Youngkin as not being ideologically pure enough to make the hard changes needed. Denouncing Republicans who are not sufficiently committed to the MAGA agenda has become a favorite diversion of Trump’s inner circle.
“They wanted to show Youngkin up,” one source says. “It was really Stephen Miller wanting to cast aspersions on a likely challenger.” By unleashing the Justice Department on UVA, Miller and his allies could box Youngkin in—and burnish their own credentials with Trump and his base. (America First Legal did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
And there may be some truth to it. Given that Youngkin’s son currently attends UVA, the governor may have been happy to allow some programs still to operate for fear of disrupting and damaging the school. Indeed, it’s not entirely clear whether Youngkin even wanted Ryan to resign. In the end, though, Miller and the D.O.J. may have forced his hand, creating a much bigger mess than he or his board had ever expected. (Governor Youngkin did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
4. Confuse and Confound
The federal demands placed on UVA raised serious concerns among legal experts. The D.O.J.’s letters ordered the university to certify the dismantling of D.E.I. programs and submit extensive internal records under tight deadlines.
“It wasn’t, like, ‘Give us the job description for your D.E.I. person,’” says an attorney who has observed the D.O.J.’s actions from within the federal government. “It was ‘Give us 10 years of admissions data.’ And that would be almost impossible to do in two months. There were unrealistic deadlines set for Jim Ryan.”
The volume and velocity of D.O.J.’s demands, this attorney says, made compliance “very, very difficult, if not impossible,” especially as UVA was still in the process of determining which programs were legally permissible under new federal interpretations.
One UVA administrator involved in the D.E.I. program says the vagueness around what was permissible created a “moving target,” one that left even legally compliant programs at risk. “UVA was compliant,” the administrator says. “Its programs were open to all and marketed as such…. There was no fear; this wasn’t a shell game; this wasn’t putting lipstick on a pig.”
Under two anti-D.E.I. executive orders issued in January 2025, Trump had directed federal agencies to interpret Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—which prohibits race-based discrimination in federally funded programs—in ways that expand enforcement and allow the withholding of federal funds from institutions deemed in violation.
For UVA, more than $1.3 billion in annual federal support was at stake.
Frederick Hess, a former UVA faculty member and education-policy scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, believes that uncertainty over how far the administration can go leaves universities hopelessly exposed.
“This is very much a gray area right now,” Hess says. “The president’s executive orders regarding interpretation of Title VI do not have the force of law. They’re executive orders. They’re not congressional statute. So, determining exactly what is permissible and not is something that needs to be adjudicated—because executive orders don’t trump statute. And so how much leeway does the administration have to interpret what Title VI means? This is a live question.”
Some of the programs flagged by the D.O.J. weren’t even race-based. The Commerce Cohort at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, for instance, offered mentorship and academic support to high-need first-year students without considering race. Yet in its June 17 letter, the D.O.J. cited promotional materials noting that 68 percent of participants were minorities as evidence of “improper race-conscious decision-making and preferential treatment”—even though UVA’s freshman-class population is only 46 percent white.
The D.O.J.’s logic inverts a familiar D.E.I. critique. Opponents of race-conscious policies typically argue that using race as a selection factor is unfair, regardless of outcome. Here, the D.O.J. treated a race-neutral program as discriminatory solely because most participants were nonwhite. The assumption is that outcome alone—not selection criteria or intent—amounts to a civil-rights violation.
“We welcome leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws,” Assistant Attorney General Dhillon tells air mail.
If adopted broadly, this logic could pressure universities to limit minority participation in race-neutral programs simply to avoid scrutiny—potentially encouraging a quota system for white students. And notably, this comes not from outside activists but from the D.O.J.’s own Civil Rights Division—signaling a profound shift in enforcement under Trump. As the French say, “Les extrêmes se touchent” (Ideological extremes meet at the edges).
5. Tighten the Net
Ryan’s team conducted a careful internal review and issued a compliance memo to department chairs, outlining which programs were “permissible” under both the board’s resolution and federal law. According to sources familiar with internal deliberations, Ryan believed the university was complying in good faith—but he was effectively muzzled.
“Jim did a whole report to the board,” a former senior administrator tells me, “and he was told, ‘You can’t do any public communications about what you’ve done.’ His view was: If I don’t communicate about it, people don’t even know that I’m complying with the law.”
As well as the board, even the university’s own legal infrastructure was pitted against him. In Virginia, the elected attorney general—currently Jason Miyares—appoints legal counsel to the state’s public universities. But if the attorney general is politically opposed to a university’s interests, the university will have no independent legal advocate to defend it. In January 2022, just days after taking office, Miyares fired the university’s general counsel, Tim Heaphy, who was then on leave serving as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack.
Miyares’s spokeswoman later described Heaphy as a “controversial” hire by former Democratic attorney general Mark Herring and said the new administration wanted legal counsel who “share[s] the philosophical and legal approach of the attorney general.”
That decision, says Virginia Senate majority leader Scott Surovell, left Ryan dangerously exposed. “Part of the reason Jim Ryan was cornered is I don’t think he really had an attorney,” Surovell tells me. “The attorney general has told board members they owe their allegiance first to the state—meaning the governor—not to their school.”
While the D.O.J. never publicly demanded President Ryan’s resignation, the message was unmistakable. According to a source close to the board, the D.O.J. allegedly said, “The university has got to cooperate, and we’re not going to deal with that guy. He’s insincere. He won’t negotiate in good faith. So get somebody else here that will. Your call.”
A university source close to the matter disputes this account. “Jim is a person of goodwill,” the source says. “He was following a good-faith version of what the law was.” According to the source, Ryan was not included in the Board of Visitors’ meetings with D.O.J. officials: “He offered to go, and he was told by the board leadership that it wouldn’t be helpful.”
Those meetings were led by Rachel Sheridan, then head of the board’s audit committee and, as of July, the university’s new rector. Sheridan, the source says, allegedly instructed the UVA leadership not to send its compliance documentation to the D.O.J. and not to speak publicly about the compliance efforts that were underway.
Ryan’s team had prepared “binders of responses, letters plus all sorts of factual material,” but was told, “We can’t send the letters to Justice yet; we’re not ready to send them.” In one meeting, when Ryan suggested it might have helped to communicate more or send the prepared letters, Sheridan allegedly replied that it would have been a “disaster.” The source concludes, “That feels like a setup to me.”
(UVA spokesperson Brian Coy wrote to AIR MAIL after publication, denying that Rector Rachel Sheridan, or any member of the board, had provided legal or strategic advice, or led discussions with the D.O.J. Sheridan, individual board members, and former president Jim Ryan did not respond to multiple requests for comment prior to publication.)
6. Dance over the Corpse
When my daughter—a rising third-year student at UVA, home on summer break—heard the news that Ryan had resigned, she shut her bedroom door and cried. She wasn’t alone. More than 40,000 students, alumni, staff, and faculty had already signed a petition urging the university to keep Ryan.
Ben Ueltschey, a May 2025 graduate and recipient of UVA’s top merit award, the Jefferson Scholarship, noted, “The people who seem most anti–President Ryan are the ones who have no active role in the university right now—perceiving things through the lens of what their time at UVA looked like.”
Ueltschey’s view reflects that of many current students, who saw Ryan as engaged and accessible—a sharp contrast to the outside forces now reshaping the university.
Few can offer better context than historian Alan Taylor, who quite literally wrote the book on UVA’s founding—Thomas Jefferson’s Education. Taylor suggests that Jefferson himself would have rejected the short-sighted project now being waged in his name—not because he opposed institutional change, but because he believed it must be forward-looking.
“Jefferson was a great enemy of tradition,” Taylor says. “He believed all institutions needed to be questioned by every generation and should be reshaped by every generation to fit the needs of that generation.” Yet the Jefferson Council—a group of older alumni seeking to restore the university as they remember it—aims not to optimize UVA for today’s students but to revive a version of the school from decades past.
Hours after Ryan resigned, Greg Brown posted a selfie on X: smoking a cigar, wearing designer sunglasses and a luxury sport coat with the collar partially popped. The caption read, “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The phrase, added to Virginia’s flag after its secession in 1861 and shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he shot Lincoln, left little doubt: a political assassination had taken place. Brown had reportedly called the university multiple times that day, eager for updates on Ryan’s fate. Now he was celebrating.
Meanwhile, the board has sprung into action to elect a new president before Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic frontrunner for governor this fall, has any chance to influence or block the outcome. “In my view,” says a source close to the board, “if Spanberger’s elected and we don’t have a new president in place with an ironclad contract, she is going to bring back Jim Ryan.”
“We urge the Board of Visitors,” the Jefferson Council declared in a public statement in February, “to embrace this opportunity to return the University to its true mission: the pursuit of knowledge and truth without political interference.” But in the name of purging politics from UVA, it has helped orchestrate one of the most overtly political interventions in the university’s history.
When even deep-pocketed Harvard is on the verge of finalizing a $500 million settlement with the Trump administration to restore frozen federal funding, what hope do other universities have? On August 7, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had ordered the Education Department to collect detailed admissions data to determine whether colleges are considering race in their applications. This scrutiny mirrors the inverted logic the D.O.J. used to attack UVA’s Commerce Cohort, where a legally compliant, race-neutral program was treated as suspect simply because most participants were nonwhite.
The strategy pioneered at UVA is now being deployed against campuses across the nation.
Greg Easley is a technologist and adjunct professor of media studies
