Someone is lying at the University of Virginia.
That much is clear after a week of letter-writing between state and school officials, capped by the university’s current rector and former president detailing for the first time their personal accounts of what led to the latter’s resignation.
On one side, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and UVa Rector Rachel Sheridan, whom he appointed in 2023, say former President Jim Ryan stepped down of his own volition in July under mounting pressure from the Trump Department of Justice over his handling of diversity, equity and inclusion policies at the school.
On the other side, Ryan and Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger say the former’s departure was a direct result of federal interference in the university’s administration. Ryan, who is speaking out now for the first time since his departure, says Sheridan and Youngkin have lied about what transpired between the DOJ and the university and that he resigned only after the DOJ threatened to withhold federal funding and “bleed UVA white” if he refused to step down.
Ryan says Sheridan, as well as Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson — a 2024 Youngkin appointee — essentially negotiated his ouster with the DOJ in order to put an end to the agency’s scrutiny of UVa DEI policies and reopen the federal funding floodgates.
Sheridan denies all of this.
“Someone is obviously not telling the truth,” Ryan wrote in a Friday letter to the UVa Faculty Senate, mere hours before the body was set to meet. “As far as I know, I am the only university president in the country who has been forced to resign as part of a supposed deal with the Trump administration. At the very least, we had Board members who were apparently more complicit than other universities.”
The vote
Ryan and Sheridan’s timelines begin, and start to diverge, in March, when the UVa Board of Visitors unanimously voted to dissolve the school’s DEI office.
In a Thursday letter to the Faculty Senate meant to “dispel some of the rumors and misinformation that have been circulating,” Sheridan wrote that the vote was an effort to stay ahead of the Trump administration which was convinced “many universities had engaged in widespread defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision” that mandated colleges stop considering race in their admissions.
“The Administration also made clear that the government would use every tool at its disposal to force universities to fully comply with their understanding of federal law,” Sheridan wrote. “In an effort to stay ahead of that danger, the Board of Visitors, under Rector Robert Hardie’s leadership, unanimously directed the University in March to discontinue any programs that did not comply.”
Ryan and Hardie received a letter from Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera on March 1 urging them to review race-based hiring and admissions practices as it “was necessary to comply with federal and state law and fulfill the board’s fiduciary duties.”
Ryan’s recounting of events leaves out Guidera’s letter. It instead alleges that Youngkin’s office drafted a DEI resolution it intended the board to pass.
“This was the first time in my seven years that the Governor’s office had drafted a resolution on behalf of the Board,” Ryan wrote.
It is unclear how forceful the governor’s resolution was considering Ryan said that “we were specifically told by an official in the Governor’s office that we were not being directed to fire anyone” and that after the DEI office was dissolved some programs could be moved “to new homes, including to a newly created office.”
Ryan said the board ultimately adopted a watered-down version of the resolution that appealed to all members of the Board of Visitors, including those appointed by Democratic governors. The resolution was unanimously approved on March 7.
But by the next month, the DOJ had opened multiple investigations into UVa and sent letters to Ryan citing “complaints” that he had failed to dismantle the school’s DEI apparatus as promised and was slow-walking efforts to do so.
Ryan did not respond to those letters, but he claims he wanted to. It was two lawyers hired by the university, Jack White and Farnaz Thompson, who stopped him, according to Ryan’s narrative. While the DOJ continued to send UVa letters requesting more information, White and Thompson allegedly instructed Ryan not to respond until they could fulfill all of the requests as one time.
“I suggested we submit what we had already put together and ask for an extension only with respect to the most recent inquiry, but I was told we should take the extensions and wait to submit a comprehensive response,” Ryan recounted.
The meetings
It is important to note that Sheridan and Wilkinson were not named rector and vice rector, respectively, until July 1.
Nevertheless, the two engaged in conversations with DOJ officials regarding DEI — and Ryan’s leadership — months before that date.
Ryan says Sheridan and Wilkinson were personally invited to the meetings by the DOJ. Sheridan says she only attended the meetings with Ryan and Hardie’s blessings.
A public records request, filed by state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and shared with The Daily Progress, reveals that Sheridan met with DOJ officials on June 3, June 24 and June 26.
In a text message she sent to Hardie unearthed in the records request, Sheridan says both Ryan and Hardie were aware of the invitation and the meetings and that Hardie could have attended if he wished.
“At counsel and DOJ’s request, Porter and I and counsel had an in person meeting on the afternoon of June 3, which you and Jim encouraged me to attend beforehand, and promptly received a full accounting for afterwards as did the full board. I asked you if you wanted to attend, but you declined and encouraged me to do so,” Sheridan’s text reads.
“President Ryan specifically requested board members to engage in all three interactions with DOJ. Board members were eager to help President Ryan and the University navigate the situation and were responsive to his requests,” university spokesman Brian Coy told The Daily Progress, reinforcing Sheridan’s narrative. “Board members were eager to help President Ryan and the University navigate the situation and were responsive to his requests.”
Ryan says that is not how he remembers it.
Ryan alleges that Sheridan and Wilkinson told him in June they had been invited to a meeting with the DOJ.
“Why they alone were asked to meet with the DOJ remains unclear to me; it also remains unclear whether Rachel and Porter suggested that the current Rector and Vice Rector should join them at the meeting,” Ryan wrote in his Friday letter. “I offered to join that meeting but was told I was not invited. I offered at a later time to go meet with the DOJ lawyers but was told by Rachel and Porter that that would be supremely unpleasant and would likely lead to a bad outcome.”
According to Ryan, Sheridan returned from one of those meetings saying the DOJ lawyers were “very upset” and insisted he “resign in order to resolve the various inquiries and avoid the federal government inflicting a great deal of damage.”
Sheridan has never said there was any such insistence.
In her Thursday letter, she wrote the “DOJ lacked confidence in President Ryan to make the changes that the Trump Administration believed were necessary to ensure compliance,” but never expressly said anyone had asked for Ryan’s resignation.
DOJ officials have said much the same, repeating since Ryan’s departure that no one had ever asked him to resign.
The pressure
Ryan says he had already been weighing quitting at the end of the 2025-26 academic year or the year after that.
“My daughter plays college soccer, and I wanted to be able to see her games in her senior year,” Ryan wrote to the Faculty Senate.
Paul Manning, another 2023 Youngkin appointee and a friend of Ryan’s, also was present at select meetings with the DOJ. Previously, Manning had encouraged Ryan to hold on to his seat through the next academic year, even if it meant butting heads with the board.
But by mid-June, Manning’s message had changed, Ryan says.
“Paul told me that he had heard from both the Governor and Rachel about the need for me to resign. He told me that, as a friend, he did not want me to go through the ordeal of trying to fight the federal government, and he was worried what the DOJ — and other agencies — might do to UVA, especially with respect to research funding. He also told me that I would likely be blamed for the losses. It was unclear to me whether this conversation was Paul’s idea, or whether he was carrying water for the Governor and Rachel,” Ryan wrote in his letter.
“The morning after our lunch on June 16, Paul called me to say that he wanted to make clear that any decision to resign was mine alone to make, which seemed incongruous with the conversation the day earlier. I could be wrong, but the message sounded a little forced, like he had been told to pass that along to me,” Ryan continued.
But that’s not what Sheridan recalls.
“Mr. Manning and I made clear that we supported President Ryan’s decision to remain as President until the end of 2025-26 academic year,” she wrote in her own letter.
Ryan insists there was a push for him to resign sooner, however. Sheridan went so far as to hire a lawyer to convince him to do it, he told the Faculty Senate.
Ryan says Sheridan put him in touch with Beth Wilkinson — best known for defending future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearings, during which he was accused of sexual misconduct. Sheridan’s attorney, Ryan says, also “apparently did some work with Columbia University during their dispute with the federal government.”
Ryan and the attorney spoke on June 24, but the conversation did not go as Ryan had planned.
“I thought she was going to talk about her experience with Columbia, but instead she was focused solely on persuading me to resign,” Ryan wrote. “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 says he was so rattled by the conversation he called Manning and Hardie. Hardie, he says, was shocked.
“He did not know, and he was quite upset about it and conveyed as much to Rachel and Paul,” Ryan wrote. “In a heated conversation subsequently with Rachel, she defended her authority to hire a lawyer for the Board because she was chair of the audit committee. I pointed out that even if she had the formal authority, on a normally functioning board the Rector would at least have been notified of the appointment and not told about it after the fact.”
A Daily Progress call to Hardie’s office on Friday went unanswered, but Hardie told the Cavalier Daily student newspaper, “I concur fully with President Ryan’s recollection of events.”
According to Ryan’s account, Manning worked with contacts at the DOJ to see if there was not some other way out while Ryan’s team ran numbers to see how long UVa could survive without federal funding.
“During the ten-day period before I resigned, I also reached out to a former Board member, who has extensive connections in DC, to see if there was some way to stop this from happening. We spent several days trying to understand if this was a bluff and/or if there were some way to forestall the looming threat to UVA and to me. In the meantime, Paul Manning reached out directly to the DOJ lawyers to make sure he was not missing anything, and he said that they told him that if I didn’t resign, they would ‘bleed UVA white.’”
Then the New York Times published a story.
The Times reported on June 26 that DOJ officials were working to oust Ryan over his handling of DEI at UVa.
Sheridan says the Times story essentially signed Ryan’s death warrant.
“The circus began when The NY Times ran its article, and the DOJ got upset with that obvious leaking. That led to the pressure and the expedited resignation,” Sheridan texted Hardie, according to Deeds’ public records request.
This is where Sheridan and Ryan agree.
“I was told that the DOJ lawyers were very upset with the leaked story in the Times and that the only offer on the table was that I needed to resign by 5pm that day or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVa,” Ryan wrote.
There has been wide speculation as to who leaked the story to the Times, with many suggesting it was Ryan himself in an attempt to forestall an ouster. Ryan, however, maintains he has “no idea” who leaked the story.
At this point, things began to move fast.
Ryan says that after the story went live, Sheridan and the attorneys White and Thompson approached him.
“I was then told that the DOJ had offered an amazing deal — unlike any the lawyers had ever seen, in their words,” Ryan continued. “They were basically willing to grant UVA blanket immunity — all of the inquires and investigations would be suspended, no financial penalties would be imposed, and agencies would be told not to cut off our research funding. They said they had never seen or heard about such a great deal for any university. Rachel praised the lawyers for their astute and savvy bargaining, and I was told this was an amazing deal.”
Ryan says that he was not able to see a copy of the UVa-DOJ deal because of fears of a further leaks.
Sheridan, meanwhile, denies knowing of any deal prior to Ryan’s resignation.
“If the DOJ ever offered to give UVA ‘blanket immunity’ or to terminate ‘all current and possible future DOJ investigations’ merely as a result of President Ryan’s resignation … that was never communicated to Mr. Manning, Ms. Wilkinson, or me,” Sheridan wrote in her Thursday letter.
Like with the resolution to dissolve the DEI office, Ryan says that Youngkin pressured the university to accept his resignation as soon as possible.
“[Hardie] indicated that the Governor’s office was instructing him to accept the resignation on behalf of the Board as soon as possible so that it would be irrevocable and the deal with the DOJ could be completed,” Ryan wrote.
In messages to Hardie around that time, Sheridan maintained that Youngkin was not pressuring anyone to do anything, calling such claims “completely inaccurate.”
Sheridan, Youngkin and the university’s communication staff continue to say Ryan’s decision to resign was his alone.
“It was both a selfless and a pragmatic decision for President Ryan to place the University’s interests above his own by departing earlier than he had planned, and it was reasonable for the Board to accept that decision,” the board wrote to Deeds in an October letter.
Ryan officially resigned July 11.
Since his departure, UVa has said that all DOJ investigations into the school have been dropped and no financial penalties will be levied, so long as the school continues to report it is in compliance with federal law.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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