Trump attacks the University of Virginia

Can anyone imagine the outrage from Republicans if former President Joe Biden demanded the resignation of the president of the University of Texas or any other state or private institution of higher education, for any reason, under the threat of withdrawing federal funding? They would be crying about state’s rights as well as government intrusion and overreach.

What Trump’s Justice Department, politicized to represent and defend Trump, not the American people or the Constitution, is doing to our nation’s great institutions of higher education is truly criminal. The impact of their actions against one of America’s true treasures, our institutions of higher education—the best in the world—has been devastating.

This past Friday, we learned that the Trump Administration’s Justice Department demanded that the University of Virginia’s president, Jim Ryan, step down as the school’s ninth president, citing, according to The New York Times, the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It seems that for Trump and his Republican supporters, any effort to ensure that students, faculty, and staff at UVA are treated equitably and fairly is inappropriate. Efforts to have a student, faculty, and staff population that reflects the real world in terms of gender and race are also a sin.

Trump and his Republican followers argue that places like Harvard and the University of Virginia are sacrificing quality for DEI objectives. This is interesting, considering that Harvard is ranked among the top universities in the world, and the Princeton Review ranks UVA as the second-best public university. If they are examples of DEI outcomes, may I suggest that everyone needs to do more DEI?

The other argument against DEI efforts by the Trump administration is that these efforts discriminate against white faculty, students, and staff. This, too, is interesting considering our nation’s 400 years of discrimination against non-white faculty, students, and staff. All of a sudden, some white people have decided that, after 400 years of receiving special consideration, no one should receive special consideration.

The Trump administration, through the Justice Department, threatened to cut off federal funding for UVA if Ryan did not resign. In his letter of resignation, Ryan said that he was “inclined to fight for what I believe in…I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

While UVA’s Board of Visitors voted several months ago to end its DEI office to appease the Trump administration, Trump’s Justice Department was not satisfied. Of course, it did not help that Ryan was once the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education from 2013 to 2018. Sadly, Harvard has been a prime target of the Trump administration. Nor did it help that in 2017 the University of Virginia was the scene of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Trump took a lot of heat when he defended the march by saying that there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

Ryan was brought in to tackle racial divide and increase diversity at UVA and he was, by all accounts, a great college president who thought UVA could be, in his words, both “great and good.” Ryan is an expert in law and education. Before working at Harvard, he was a Distinguished Professor at UVA’s School of Law, one of the nation’s top law schools.

While Dean at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, he expanded the faculty and established the Global Visiting Fellows Program, which attracted many international scholars to Harvard. While expanding Harvard’s reach and diversity of talent, he doubled the school’s revenue and raised $340 million in donations before becoming UVA’s president in 2018.

Ryan was also a successful fundraiser at the University of Virginia. In 2019, he launched the “Honor the Future” campaign, raising over $6 billion —$1 billion more than the campaign’s goal.

Multiple media outlets reported that Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and other state Republican leaders had encouraged the Trump administration to go after Ryan. While they were successful in the short term, Republicans face statewide elections this November. The Democratic nominee for governor, Abigail Spanberger, a UVA graduate, is expected to win. After Ryan’s resignation, she stated that the threats from the Trump administration are “a clear infringement upon academic freedom and should concern every Virginian and American.” She ends her statement by saying that she “will work to restore a standard of leadership that puts academic excellence, Virginia’s students, and the strength of Virginia’s public colleges and universities ahead of any political agenda.”

Governor Youngkin did, finally, issue a statement, although he failed to support Ryan or his state’s flagship university from Trump’s attacks. Youngkin is out of a job come November and I’m sure he is hoping Trump offers him one. Bottom line, Youngkin is looking out for himself, not Ryan, not the University of Virginia, and not the citizens of Virginia.

Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, however, called Trump’s actions “outrageous” and said that “this is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.” They called Ryan “a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps.”

Peter McDonough of the American Council on Education wonders if the Trump administration’s role in removing Ryan may “signal a historic disruption for higher education” as now universities will “need to align with the winner of the last presidential election” instead of “their collective strength from being independent and different.”

Armand Alacbay, senior vice president at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, referred to Trump’s demand for Ryan’s resignation as “governmental intrusion” and warned of the “grave danger to the quality and future of higher education if these types of decisions become a function of the federal government.”

The federal government’s involvement in the firing of a university president under pressure to withhold federal funds is both inappropriate and problematic. Where does this end? Will Republicans, quiet as a mouse today, be as quiet when a future Democratic administration goes after university presidents who don’t support their political agendas? Will our independent universities become another arm of the Executive Branch?

Authoritarian governments go after institutions of higher education because they are threatened by educated and informed citizens who can expose their corruptness. Trump doesn’t like informed citizens any more than he likes government intelligence agencies telling him what he doesn’t want to hear about Iran’s nuclear capability. As Trump said on February 24, 2016, after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses, “I love the poorly educated.” For good reason, I’m sure.