Media Gets It Wrong on UVA President’s Resignation

What last week’s resignation of University of Virginia President Jim Ryan wasn’t was an assault on academia and the independence of America’s universities as the media and Democrat elected officials are claiming. What it is, is a serious opportunity to talk about federalism and real academic independence.

First, the details. The U.S. Department of Justice was investigating allegations made by UVA alumni that Mr. Jefferson’s University had not, in fact, complied with the U.S. Department of Education directive to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order banning such policies. Noncompliance meant risking Department of Education and other federal funding. According to the university’s finance page, that funding is 12.1% of its budget.

It appears that U.S. Assistant Attorney General (and UVA alum who went to law school with Ryan) Harmeet Dhillon had found sufficient proof that the school had not complied and offered the university board a choice: Ryan or the money.

If you ask Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., it was “driven by a very, very disturbing agenda and a direct attack on public education, and when you’re attacking UVA, who’s next?”

His colleague, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., went on the Sunday talk show circuit and proclaimed, “This is the most outrageous action this crowd has taken on education.”

Nice copy, but it wasn’t.

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In its unanimous ruling in the case Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services just last month, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court that “Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Simply put, you cannot use racial preferences when hiring or providing benefits, which is what DEI programs do.

In a recent Daily Signal Podcast (“Racism Rebranded”), Helen Raleigh dissected how a DEI campaign is keeping qualified Asian American students with outstanding grades from being admitted to Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Spots are instead reserved for students who might not be as qualified but who are “more preferred” racial minorities in the DEI hierarchy.

How far we’ve fallen from Dr. King’s dream and from the words of his final speech, which extolled us to “live up to the words you wrote down on paper,” a reference to the Declaration of Independence and its language of equality.

This week, we mark the official beginning of the United States’ 250th anniversary, and Thomas Jefferson’s words that he “wrote down on paper” still demand our attention: “That all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

But the most important part of that document may be the words that are too often forgotten: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That is what just happened last week at the university that Jefferson would “father” a quarter of a century after writing the Declaration of Independence: Government by the governed was securing equal rights for all. But no media outlet seems to have covered the story in that way.

So, the popular question in and around academic circles regarding the UVA story boils down to, “What gives the federal government the authority to make such demands of UVA?”

Certainly, the U.S. Constitution does not have a section explaining how the Department of Education is supposed to work, because education was never conceived of as something you would need the federal government to run. However, starting in 1932, when Congress passed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act to provide $300 million in “loans” to the states (and thence to cities and counties) for relief from the looming Great Depression, the precedent was set.

Each of those “loans” and all the outright grants that followed from the federal government came with strings attached. That process is still in play as school funding comes with conditions such as what a school’s curriculum should include, how many police officers should be on patrol at any one time, that schools can’t allow men to compete in women’s-only sports or use their locker rooms, and much more.

UVA was trying to exist independently from the federal government telling it how it should operate and how its students should, as Jefferson put it when explaining his plan to start the university, “drink from the cup of knowledge.”

If the university is truly interested in a more independent model, perhaps it ought to call those in the administration at Hillsdale College—a college which steadfastly refuses to take anything even remotely associated with federal funding—and ask them how they do it.

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