Scott Douglas Gerber | July 2, 2025
(The Washington Times) — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently expressed “complete confidence” in the University of Virginia’s board of visitors as the board prepares to decide who will succeed Jim Ryan as the school’s president. Mr. Ryan resigned Friday under pressure from the Justice Department.
Unfortunately, Mr. Youngkin is wrong to have confidence in UVA’s board, let alone “complete” confidence. The board’s most recent meeting illustrates why. During that June 6 session, Rector Robert Hardie trumpeted that Mr. Ryan was doing a “remarkable” job as president. That assertion is wholly untenable in light of Mr. Ryan’s stonewalling of the directives of President Trump, Mr. Youngkin and UVA’s board to dismantle the university’s illegal race/gender/ethnic diversity, equity and inclusion regime. He also ignored orders to increase the intellectual and political diversity of UVA’s leftist faculty.
Concerning Mr. Ryan’s stonewalling about UVA’s DEI apparatus, Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, recently told CNN, “I haven’t gotten anything in writing from UVA, unlike many of the other institutions of higher learning.” She continued: “I’ve had chancellors come meet me. I’ve had lawyers come meet me. They’ve given us reams and reams of documents. Not UVA”
UVA’s board either knew that Mr. Ryan was stonewalling a federal investigation or didn’t care how he was responding to a federal investigation. Either way, the board’s behavior hardly merits Mr. Youngkin’s “complete confidence.” Also worth noting is that the board hired Mr. Ryan knowing his principal accomplishment, according to his own UVA webpage, was increasing the “size, strength, and diversity” of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s faculty.
The same holds true for Mr. Ryan’s stonewalling about viewpoint diversity. In April, the board instructed Mr. Ryan to have a member of UVA’s faculty senate comment on the viewpoint diversity problem at the board’s June meeting. Instead, Mr. Ryan shut down discussion of the subject before the faculty member had a chance to speak. Significantly, the board let Mr. Ryan get away with this ploy shortly after board member Doug Wetmore — apparently, one of the few board members paying attention — pointed out that “95%” of political donations by UVA’s faculty went to Democrats and only “5%” went to Republicans. Mr. Wetmore then said: “There’s not a purposeful effort to try to balance the faculty from a philosophical and political point of view.”
What does UVA’s board do? Seemingly little more than congratulating one another for what the members claim is their own terrific work. Indeed, at the June meeting, the board delivered no fewer than six standing ovations, all of which were in recognition of so-called jobs well done. For example, Mr. Hardie and Vice Rector Carlos Brown received separate standing ovations at the request of each other, with Mr. Brown going so far as to call Mr. Hardie “the hardest working rector in higher education.” If that were true, Mr. Hardie would not have stated during the same meeting that Mr. Ryan — who Mr. Hardie knew or should have known was stonewalling a federal civil rights investigation — was doing a “remarkable” job and that his administrative team was “incredible.”
Studies have shown that most college and university board members behave as UVA’s board is behaving, their fiduciary duty to the institution and its students be damned. However, it is difficult to imagine that any diligent board member would behave in the manner UVA’s board is behaving while the university they are responsible for overseeing is under investigation by the federal government for systemic discrimination.
Like Ms. Dhillon, I am a graduate of the University of Virginia, and I love the school, but UVA has lost its way, and it can’t get back on track if Mr. Youngkin continues to pretend the board is doing its job. The governor must remember that the board had endorsed Mr. Ryan’s illegal DEI goals. He also needs to know that UVA’s incoming rector, Rachel Sheridan, signed onto a June 30 message to the UVA community from the outgoing rector, repeating Mr. Hardie’s misguided pronouncement that Mr. Ryan had done a “remarkable” job.
Last but far from least, it needs to be brought to the governor’s attention that the person Ms. Sheridan and Mr. Hardie have named “acting president,” Jennifer Wagner Davis, insulted Mr. Wetmore at the June 6 meeting for his objection to the fact that UVA’s 2025-2026 budget still appears to include funding for DEI. After all, Mr. Youngkin declared in March that “DEI is done at the University of Virginia.”
Scott Douglas Gerber is the author of, most recently, “Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies” (Cambridge University Press).
