‘Someone is not telling the truth’: Former UVA president Jim Ryan alleges ‘forced’ resignation amid pressure from DOJ, university heads

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WRIC) — Former University of Virginia (UVA) president Jim Ryan sent a letter to faculty senators on Friday detailing the events that led to his resignation earlier this summer. He alleges that the circumstances with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and university heads led to his controversial, “forced” resignation.

In the letter sent on Friday, Nov. 14, Ryan said that Board of Visitors members Rachel Sheridan and Porter Wilkinson took a leading role in negotiating his resignation with the DOJ. He alleges this was done without the knowledge of the Board of Visitors rector at the time, Robert Hardie, or many other board members. Sheridan and Wilkinson were appointed to the roles of rector and vice rector in a June board meeting.

Sheridan sent her own letter on Thursday, Nov. 13 — but it was not shared with 8News until the following day — which claimed that hundreds of policies and websites had needed to change to “correctly and clearly conform to the [Students for Fair Admissions] law.” Sheridan also claimed that she had never negotiated with the DOJ and only interacted with them three times — once in person and twice over the phone.

Ryan resigned in June amid pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration regarding the university’s “diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.” In a statement issued following this announcement, Ryan wrote that he would not put UVA in jeopardy to save his own job.

Professors have since condemned the board’s decision to dissolve UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts after Trump ordered an end to those DEI efforts in January, which he has labeled unlawful discrimination.

According to Ryan, the board insisted they remain silent about the changes.

“So began the narrative that we were recalcitrant and resistant to any changes, which was not true but would continue up and through my forced resignation,” Ryan wrote.

Ryan claimed trouble began at a March board meeting. The university received a drafted resolution from Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office that criticized DEI. He wrote that the original resolution was “quite sweeping and filled with inflammatory rhetoric criticizing DEI, much of it lifted from President Trump’s executive order.”

In his letter, Ryan said that Youngkin’s appearance on Fox News, to say that “DEI is dead” at UVA, added further confusion as to what the Trump Administration’s intentions were.

Ryan detailed how UVA received seven letters from the DOJ requesting more and more information as part of various investigations. With each new inquiry, UVA lawyers applied for extensions to documentation deadlines, Ryan said that while he repeatedly suggested submitting what had already been gathered, he was told to instead take the extensions and wait to make a more thorough and complete submission at a later date. At the time of his resignation, Ryan said the university had still not responded to the DOJ’s inquiries because of this strategy.

“It is false that members of the Board prevented President Ryan from providing documentation to the DOJ that would have fully addressed the DOJ’s concerns,” Sheridan wrote in her letter. “Even once DOJ subsequently reviewed the University’s fulsome responses, it concluded that the information justified closing only two of the investigations—but, pointedly, not the other five.”

In her letter, Sheridan claimed that Hardie and Ryan did not want to attend a meeting with the DOJ. Instead, she says Ryan asked her and Wilkinson to attend the meeting in their capacities as chair and vice chair of the board’s Audit, Risk, and Compliance Committee. Despite refusing a request to meet in May, due to her belief that it was “inappropriate for [her] role as a member of the Board,” she agreed to meet DOJ lawyers in June because Ryan had requested it.

Ryan’s letter makes no mention of this request, instead claiming that Sheridan reached out to him days before the meeting to tell him she and Wilkinson had been invited to attend the meeting.

“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. “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.”

A day prior to the New York Times article that leaked his resignation, the publication reported that the DOJ had called on Ryan to resign.

Ryan recalled the day the New York Times article, which details how DOJ lawyers were pressuring him to resign, leaked. He claimed that Sheridan told him that UVA had a written agreement –one she allegedly called “an amazing deal” — with the Trump administration that they would have stopped inquiring or investigating UVA had Ryan resigned.

“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 5 p.m. that day [Thursday, June 26] or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVA,” he wrote.

Ryan claimed that the DOJ 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.”

Sheridan disputed this claim, saying that any alleged offer from the DOJ for “blanket immunity” in exchange for Ryan’s resignation was never communicated to her, Manning or Wilkinson — the primary DOJ intermediaries.

In his letter, Ryan said he repeatedly asked to see the alleged DOJ offer in writing, but was told that, even though “at least part of it was in writing,” he could not see it “for fear of a leak.”

Per his letter, Ryan was told that if he didn’t resign, the DOJ would punish the university, and the board would fire him the following day. He explained that a close colleague of his told him, “If you don’t have any Board support, it’s over. You can’t fight this on your own.”

While Sheridan’s letter acknowledged “the gravity of the situation was apparent” after the Trump administration had frozen $2.2 billion in research grants at Harvard, she claims that she and another board member who was acting as an intermediary between Ryan and the DOJ — Paul Manning — assured him that they would not support any efforts by the board to remove him.

“While it was not up to me, I support the decision that President Ryan made,” Sheridan wrote. “The situation was terrible and unfair. But the University we all love was in grave peril. It was clear that the [DOJ] had focused on [UVA] and lacked confidence in President Ryan’s ability to bring the University into a state of compliance, that their investigations would continue to escalate, and that they were prepared to deploy all of the leverage they had.”

According to Ryan, he began writing his letter over the summer, shortly after his resignation, to keep a record of the events while they were fresh in his mind.

Ryan called the circumstances surrounding his ousting “surreal and bewildering.” He addressed those who may question why he did not go public at the time, saying that he was worried that UVA would “lose funding and get attacked by the Trump administration.” He prefaced that by saying some may see it as “so outlandish as not to be entirely believable.”

“What is not clear to me, however, is whether the threat was real, or whether the idea came from the Board members who spoke with the DOJ lawyers, our own lawyers, the Governor, or some combination of that group,” Ryan wrote. “[Associate Attorney General for Civil Rights] Harmeet Dhillon emphatically and publicly stated, twice, that neither she nor her DOJ colleagues demanded my resignation or offered some sort of quid pro quo. This is not consistent with what I was told by Rachel and Paul, but I was never in the room when these conversations took place.”

He said due to those contradictory statements, “someone is not telling the truth.”

“I was never going to give up the core values of UVA or my own principles simply to satisfy the prevailing political winds or the political ambitions of some. In the end, that may have been the real problem, though I will probably never know,” Ryan wrote. “What I do know is that I was accused more than once by some Board members and the Governor’s office of being stubborn.”

In August, Paul Mahoney became the university’s interim president and resolved DOJ investigations in October when UVA agreed to abide by White House guidance preventing discrimination in admissions and hiring.

On Thursday, Nov. 14, governor-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) requested that the university wait until she assumes office to pick its 10th president in a letter to the Board of Visitors dated earlier that day. Youngkin then accused Spanberger of what he claimed was an instance of unprecedented overreach on her part.