“Who is telling the truth?”
UVa Updates November 16, 2025
We have now reached an operatic pitch. Many smart people have already deconstructed the letters that came out between November 12 and 14 (see the letter from Rachel Sheridan and the one from Jim Ryan). Jim Ryan dropped a truth bomb on Friday morning. I heard audible gasps and frantic texting on the Amtrak train from Charlottesville to Washington DC.
NOVEMBER 12 The Governor Elect Abigail Spanberger wrote a letter to the BOV encouraging them to cease and desist their fraudulent search until she has filled five empty seats at their table. This might mean things like canceling interviews. She worked as a postal inspector and a CIA officer so she comes with professional experience in tracking conspiracies and corruption. She can’t tell us the details of course….(See the Cavalier Daily for the complete letter).
NOVEMBER 13: Lame Duck Governor Youngkin (Glendolin) did not like this letter at all. He got elected on, among other things, “promoting the traditional family.” So it’s not surprising that he was “compelled” to address what he called her “breach.” He mansplained away about the fairness of the DOJ agreement and couldn’t resist saying that the DOJ did what it had to because Jim Ryan was not committed to “following the law.” For those following from afar, note that our former president is a law professor and in fact believes in the rule of law. He cc’d the Rector, Vice Rector, and the UVa Board of Visitors. I don’t know if he cc’d the people he tried to appoint. This should be read out loud in the voice of Big Bird with an occasional infusion of the Jaws theme.
NOVEMBER 13 Rector Rachel Sheridan sent a letter to the faculty through the faculty senate. Convoluted and hard to follow, it needed an editor and maybe some bullet points. The short version is “I didn’t do it.” and “It’s all someone else’s fault. Someone else includes Jim Ryan, the former Rector, the lawyers and maybe cookie monster.” Also, she had nothing to do with negotiating, and this legal stuff is too complicated for faculty to really understand so we should start behaving and “collaborating.” This was in poor taste. November 13 is the third anniversary of the UVa shooting in which one student shot and killed three others. The now fourth year students were first years at the time. This was a deeply traumatic moment for our community. This was not the move of someone who cares about students. Jim Ryan noted in his response that he delayed by a day for precisely that reason. Her letter is in this article.
NOVEMBER 14, 1925, The BOV had to respond to a letter about sewage from fraternity houses draining into the creek creating a “menace to health.”
November 14, 2025 Jim Ryan Testifies!!! You really must read all 12 pages of this “stunned and angry” letter. It is damning. This is the stuff of the TV show scandal without the murder and torture. But also, importantly, the letter sounds like Jim; it is authentic, thoughtful and a bit bemused. It reveals that Sheridan left out key details of the DOJ meetings from her letter. Perhaps most damning, she said that Ryan did not want to attend the meetings. He said he was told that he could not attend. Sheridan evidentially told Ryan not to share incremental reports on DEI compliance. She delivered the news that the DOJ wanted him to resign. Mostly I’ll quote from him. For those with their own battles to fight, I recommend the final two paragraphs. This should also be read by those who like to throw around the phrase “breaking the law” in the context of efforts to create more inclusive institutions:
“Finally, as indicated earlier, the lines between policy and the law have been repeatedly blurred during this entire episode. The Board and University leaders set policy; the DOJ enforces the law. Too often, people within the DOJ and on our own Board have implied that if we were following policies that they did not favor, we were somehow doing something illegal. That is not the case, obviously. DEI, for example, is not itself illegal. One can do illegal things in the name of DEI, just like one can do illegal things in the name of promoting viewpoint diversity. But diversity itself, including viewpoint diversity, is not against the law.
We were committed to following the actual law. We were also open to changing policies and practices if they were not working well or if there were persuasive, principled reasons to change course. At the same time, 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. What I do know is that I was accused more than once by some Board members and the Governor’s office of being stubborn. Perhaps I am. But stubborn and principled often look the same, especially to those who are unprincipled.”
FACULTY SENATE RESOLUTIONS Thank you Cavalier Daily. They dropped the story about the letters in the middle of a contentious faculty senate meeting. A senator read the following quote from former Rector Roberty Hardie: “I concur fully with President Ryan’s recollections.” The senate passed a resolution asking the University to pause the presidential search and asking the Rector and Vice Rector to Resign. The Senate chair told the Cavalier Daily that, “Regardless of what the letter stated, it was too little too late. We have been asking questions since July, and it wasn't until there was a motion calling for their resignations before we got answers … The agreement was signed for 21 days, 22 days before they provided answers,” Seidman said. “If they wanted to be transparent, they had ample opportunity.” There are many who would also like a vote of no confidence in Interim President Mahoney. See the resolution here. See the Hardie quotation here.
BACK TO THE LETTER
DEI Ryan noted that the Governor “crowed” on Fox news that “DEI is dead at UVA,” which means almost nothing. They did begin a compliance review. “The legal review was never something we shied away from, as none of us had any interest in violating the law. At the same time, it is fair to say that the law here is not crystal clear. It is also fair to say that simply because someone in power does not like a policy, that does not automatically make the policy illegal.” His team prepared a memo on DEI changes, but then BOV member Sheridan told them not to share it.
DOJ INQUIRES AND VOLUMES OF INFO They spent weeks assembling tons of documents about admissions and just before they sent said documents another request came. Jim suggested multiple times that they submit what had been prepared. But the legal team wanted to wait for a comprehensive response. “It is impossible for me to know, but the timing of the DOJ letters, the ever expanding scope of their inquiries, and their willingness to give us extension after extension made me wonder more than once if the DOJ was not actually interested in our response, perhaps because they showed—from what I saw—that we were complying with the law. Regardless, the public claim made by one of the DOJ lawyers that we kept stalling by asking for extension after extension was misleading, at best. Why our own lawyers did not seem to understand or appreciate that submitting information in stages would be better than submitting nothing at all, especially given the false accusations that we were stonewalling, remains a mystery to me. I do not know if they were exercising their independent judgment or receiving directions from a Board member and/or the Attorney General’s office.”
THE DOJ LAWYERS Ryan said, “The two lawyers most involved on the DOJ side, in turn, were Gregory Brown and Harmeet Dhillon. Both are UVA alums, and Harmeet and I overlapped in Law School, though I do not have a strong memory of her. Gregory Brown worked as a plaintiff’s attorney in Charlottesville prior to joining the Justice Department last winter. He brought several cases against the university while a plaintiff’s attorney and while I was president. I heard along the way that neither of the DOJ lawyers were fans of mine.”
DOJ MEETINGS Here is where it turns into a TV show. Sheridan and Wilkinson were invited to a DOJ meeting with Harmeet and Gregory. Note that Sheridan and Wilkinson were not yet Rector and Vice Rector. Jim was not allowed to attend. “Rachel reported to me after the meeting that the DOJ lawyers were very upset and that they basically insisted that I would need to resign in order to resolve the various inquiries and avoid the federal government inflicting a great deal of damage to UVA. I found that a little shocking but also a little hard to believe. We nonetheless discussed what that might look like.” Then, “Porter reported out on their conversation with the DOJ, and they explained how upset the lawyers were and how serious this was. They omitted, however, the part about the DOJ insisting that I needed to resign, for reasons I still do not understand.”
PAUL MANNING’S DIRE WARNING (think Don Giovanni theme) At lunch on June 16, “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.”
JIM FOUGHT FOR THE UNIVERSITY There were I know those who felt that Ryan abandoned ship and should have fought harder. This never made sense to me. This is simply not the Jim I know. He writes, “Over the course of the ten days between my lunch with Paul and my resignation, I had several conversations with Rachel and Paul. I again indicated my willingness to resign if it was in the best interests of UVA but raised a number of objections, mostly having to do with academic freedom and the independence of the Board to hire and fire the President. At one point I asked what else the Board would be willing to give away to avoid a potentially expensive fight with the federal government—raising examples like cancelling the basketball program. Rachel responded by saying that was ‘such a law professor question,’ which was not meant as a compliment. I was trying to get them, with little success, to appreciate the value of the principles at stake and the cost of sacrificing them, even if that cost couldn’t be easily quantified.”
THE BOV COULD NOT MEET. He writes, “I was told that best way for me to avoid a Board meeting was for me to simply resign. They told me that this was just an issue between me and the Trump administration. I let them know I thought otherwise, and that a decision by Board members not to do anything to prevent this was a decision all the same, and that they would likely be held accountable for it—both by our community and by their fellow Board members.”
CLOSING QUESTIONS Lawyers and teachers alike end with questions. Jim Ryan has many. This is the fourth one. “Harmeet Dhillon, one of the DOJ lawyers, publicly and unequivocally stated—twice—that neither she nor her colleagues asked for my resignation or offered some sort of quid pro quo. That is not what Rachel, Porter, and Paul conveyed to me. Who is telling the truth?”