Former UVA president Jim Ryan offers first detailed account of his resignation

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - Former University of Virginia President Jim Ryan is speaking out about his resignation under pressure from the federal government.

Stating he wants to “set the record straight,” Ryan has published a version of events leading up to his departure in June, which stands in contrast to others and raises hard questions about what led to his ouster.

Ryan sent the 12-page letter to the UVA Faculty Senate on Friday, November 14, a day after the Rector of the Board of Visitors Rachel Sheridan shared her own account of events. It also follows this week’s letter from Governor Glenn Youngkin to Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger criticizing her call for UVA to halt its presidential search, which also offered a conflicting description of why Ryan resigned.

“In light of Rector Sheridan’s letter, as well as the Governor’s, which I do not think present an accurate accounting of my resignation, I am sending my document to all of you now,” Ryan wrote.

The former president then launches into a detailed description of the events that led to his resignation, stating that “the trouble began at the March 2025 Board meeting, when we received a resolution regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) that Governor Youngkin’s office drafted."

Ryan says the Board then went onto pass a “fairly mild” version of the DEI resolution they had received, one which called for dissolving the official DEI office and moving all permissible programs to other institutions.

The Department of Justice’s investigations into DEI on Grounds ensued, with the external firm, McGuire Woods, representing UVA in the matter.

A big point of contention between Ryan and Sheridan is the role the Rector played in conversations with the Department of Justice, and how those conversations took place.

Ryan says Sheridan told him that she and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson had been invited to a meeting with the DOJ lawyers alone. He added that he never once spoke directly with the Board.

“I offered to join that meeting but was told I was not invited,” Ryan said. “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.”

Sheridan, though, says she only attended the meeting at Ryan’s request.

“In early June, the DOJ indicated to counsel that it wished to have a meeting to convey its broader views on the University’s lack of compliance with civil rights laws directly to UVA leadership rather than just to counsel,” Sheridan wrote. “President Ryan encouraged Ms. Wilkinson and me to engage with the Department...Because President Ryan specifically asked if Ms. Wilkinson and I would participate in a conversation with the prosecutors at the Department leading the investigations, we reluctantly agreed.”

Later, Sheridan writes that she never negotiated with the Department of Justice.

It was after that meeting, Ryan says, that Sheridan told him that he would need to resign to avoid the federal government “inflicting a great deal of damage to UVA.”

But, Ryan alleges, that information was not shared at the Board meeting.

“They omitted, however, the part about the DOJ insisting that I needed to resign, for reasons I still do not understand,” Ryan wrote.

Sheridan, though, points to Associate Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon’s public statement about the government’s lack of trust and confidence in Ryan to properly comply with the order to dismantle DEI.

“That was the DOJ’s position that I conveyed to President Ryan, his senior leadership team, and the full Board,” Sheridan wrote.

There’s also dispute between the two accounts about what was promised in exchange for Ryan’s resignation. Ryan says Sheridan and the two external lawyers told him that the DOJ was going to “rain hell” on UVA if he did not resign that day. He says he was also told by a colleague that if he did not resign, the Board would fire him the next day.

“I was then told that the DOJ had offered an amazing deal,” Ryan said. “They were basically willing to grant UVA blanket immunity - all of the inquiries and investigations would be suspended, no financial penalties would be imposed, and agencies would be told not to cut off our research funding.”

Sheridan, though, says differently.

“Contrary to inaccurate narratives that have been circulated, President Ryan’s resignation was not accompanied by any assurance from the government that it would immediately end its scrutiny of the University,” Sheridan wrote. “As far as I am aware, it was always clear that a resolution agreement would have to be negotiated...If the DOJ ever offered to give UVA “blanket immunity” or to terminate “all current and possible future DOJ investigations” merely as a result of President Ryan’s resignation, as Senator Deeds recently claimed, that was never communicated to Mr. Manning, Ms. Wilkinson, or me."

Calling the episode “surreal and bewildering,” and something that felt like a “hostage situation,” Ryan ends his letter by reflecting on his decision and posing some questions of his own.

That included one about who specifically called for his resignation.

“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,” Ryan writes, having earlier stated he did not see why Dhillon would be inclined to lie. “That is not what Rachel, Porter, and Paul conveyed to me. Who is telling the truth?”

He also condemns the Board for not doing enough to protect him from federal pressure.

“I do not understand why the Board members involved did not say from the very beginning that forcing the resignation of the president because of federal pressure is off the table,” Ryan wrote. “It is puzzling and disappointing that they did not recognize and convey that this was an outrageous incursion into the Board’s own authority, with little legal basis or justification.”

Sheridan says she and a fellow Board member, Paul Manning, made clear to Ryan multiple times that they would not support any potential efforts by the Board to remove him.

“I know that many believe that the Board should have refused to accept President Ryan’s resignation and essentially dared the Department of Justice to pursue enforcement actions,” Sheridan wrote. “The outcome of that fight would have been highly uncertain, and no legal process or even victory in court could have protected the University from much of the resulting harm...In the interim (even assuming an ultimate victory in court), there would have been tangible damage that would have fallen on countless individual students, faculty, staff, and their families, who are entirely innocent and would have had no say in the profound disruption of their lives and careers.”

She adds that it is not “realistic or helpful” to act like Charlottesville exists in a bubble, and that the university is entitled to guaranteed federal funding.

The two disparate accounts have already prompted reaction on Grounds.

“There were many people involved who were not, it seems, being fully honest with each other, and so everyone has a slightly different set of facts,” Jeri Seidman, Chair of the Faculty Senate, told 29News. “It’s hard to say if people are misremembering things intentionally or if our memories shift as we live through them again.”

Because faculty, students, and staff that have been demanding answers from the Board since June 27, and particularly since the suspension of DOJ investigations on October 22, Seidman described Sheridan’s letter as “too little, too late.”

“Even if everything that the Rector said is exactly true, would I still think that she was behaving in a courageous way I would expect of Board leadership?” Seidman said. “And the answer to that is no.”

Sheridan’s letter was sent to the Senate by Faculty Representative to the Board of Visitors, Jim Lambert, despite the Senate calling on her to meet with them in person.

“She only provided the information indirectly, she only provided it in writing, and if she really wanted to be transparent, why didn’t she provide this immediately after the agreement was signed?” Seidman said.

Those were the questions raised at Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting, in which Senators voted 41-17 to pass a resolution calling for the immediate resignation of UVA’s rector and vice rector.

Over the summer, the Senate issued a vote of “no confidence” in the Board, but Seidman says this resolution is “dramatically different.”

“The no confidence vote outlined two paths forward to restoring trust,” Seidman said. “This is essentially a statement...that the Faculty Senate doesn’t see any path forward to rebuild trust and asks for new leadership that we can learn to trust.”

Joel Gardner, President of the Jefferson Council, says it’s tough to say whether the community will ever get one, uniform set of concrete answers, but that he disagrees with many of Ryan’s statements.

“There was a lot of speculation in Jim’s letter,” Gardner told 29News. “If [the Board] wanted to get rid of Jim Ryan, they could have done it well before June. There was always talk of that coming from the people who oppose him, but there was never a concerted effort by that Board, and certainly, to my knowledge, not by Rector Sheridan or the Vice Rector to get rid of Jim.”

Gardner added that he believes there has been a “coordinated effort” among Ryan’s allies, the Governor-elect, Virginia state Democrats, and certain on-Grounds groups to “delegitimize” the Board in an effort to pursue a political agenda.

He also disagrees with Ryan’s characterization of how closely the former president was attempting to accommodate the decision of the Board when it came to the DEI resolution.

“No matter what Jim might say in his letter, there is a massive amount of evidence that this was being slow walked and this was in essence a charade to try to not do anything,” Gardner said. “There was no real attempt to do away with [DEI]...At the crux of the matter was there was a unanimous decision by the Board that Jim Ryan was thumbing his nose at.”

Ryan concluded his letter with the following statement.

“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,” Ryan wrote. “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.”

29News reached out to a spokesperson for Governor Youngkin but did not hear back.

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