Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The University of Virginia president resigned on Friday under pressure from the Trump administration, as the government broadens its attacks on higher education to include public universities.
James Ryan’s decision to step down comes after the justice department demanded he leave the university to resolve an investigation into the school’s diversity policies. It marks an escalation of the federal government’s moves against public institutions, despite recent indications it was nearing settlements with elite private universities including Columbia and Harvard.
Ryan, in a message to the university on Friday, wrote: “I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University. But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”
His departure is the latest in a series of university president resignations over the past 18 months after demands from conservative Republicans over alleged antisemitism on campus and purportedly illegal diversity measures. The heads of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania have all turned over during the period.
The Trump administration has sought tighter controls on private elite Ivy League institutions, cut funding to universities and threatened restrictions on international students.
The New York Times first reported that the Department of Justice had earlier this month demanded Ryan quit as part of the government’s efforts to address what it claimed were insufficient efforts to overhaul the university’s diversity practices.
America First Legal, a conservative non-profit founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote to the department last month accusing the university of “operating programs based on race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, and other impermissible, immutable characteristics under the pretext of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ . . . in open defiance of federal civil rights law”.
Academic groups denounced the Trump administration’s move to push Ryan out and its attacks against higher education more broadly.
“This is worse than the McCarthy period,” said Joan Scott from the American Association of University Professors. “Then they went after individual supposed communists, this time it is whole institutions. The agenda is really to take down higher education.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, said the White House was only interested in “crushing” institutes of higher education.
“The government is operating like a criminal mob, by instilling fear, threatening vague punishments and making an example of people who step out of line,” he said.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who appoints members to the university’s board, said: “The Board of Visitors has my complete confidence as they swiftly appoint a strong interim steward, and undertake the national search for a transformational leader that can take Mr [Thomas] Jefferson’s university into the next decade and beyond.”
Source link
