Too Early to Construct Narratives
In a statement to the University of Virginia faculty senate, Acting President J.J. Davis confirmed yesterday that the university had obtained outside counsel to assist in negotiations with the Department of Justice regarding “many areas of the inquiry” relating to the dismantling of racial preferences and DEI.
“Through counsel, UVA is working collaboratively with the U.S. Department of Justice on a voluntary resolution agreement,” Davis said. “Coordination between counsel for UVA and DOJ is ongoing. UVA officials cannot discuss any related issues to DOJ at this time while they are in the midst of the negotiations. However, when a final resolution agreement is reached, the final resolution agreement will be public.”
After reading the prepared statement, Davis added, “There has been engagement of UVA with external counsel since April of this year with various leaders … including current and former board members.” Those board leaders likely included Robert Hardie, who was rector until June 30, and his successor Rachel Sheridan.
The statement does little to confirm or contradict the emerging Democratic narrative that the Department of Justice was overreaching its authority by pressing for the removal of President Jim Ryan. That might prove to be the case, but there is insufficient evidence at this point to draw a hard conclusion. Partisans would be well advised to wait for more information before committing themselves to theories that might be revealed to be untenable. In other words, everyone, take a chill pill.
Virginia Democrats want to nationalize the statewide elections this fall by painting themselves as unalterably opposed to President Donald Trump, whose polling numbers are negative in Virginia. They have seized upon the opportunity presented by Ryan’s resignation — a story that has gained national attention — to accuse Trump administration officials of engaging in authoritarian suppression of academic freedom and autonomy.
Speaking as a journalist and not an activist member of the Jefferson Council, which called for new leadership at UVA, I don’t know how the Ryan resignation went down. Only a few insiders know the story, and they aren’t talking.
The New York Times reported, based on two anonymous sources, that DOJ demanded Ryan’s resignation as a condition of settling its civil rights inquiry. We don’t know the identities of those sources or what their agenda was in leaking the information to the Times, thus vaulting the issue into national prominence, polarizing the issue, and stirring up Democrats. For all we know — and we don’t know one way or the other — it was a hail-Mary pass designed to save Ryan’s hide.
Untroubled by anonymous sources, Democrats have painted the UVA intervention and Ryan’s ouster as the handiwork of Trump himself. We don’t know if Trump was involved in — or even informed of — what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and her deputy Gregory Brown were doing. We do know that both attorneys have UVA degrees and were tracking events there before they joined the Trump administration. I like to think that they tackled UVA, among all the institutions they could have focused on, because the Jefferson Council did such a good job of documenting the DEI-related abuses there. But I don’t know that to be a fact. Indeed, Brown drew from abundant first-hand experience with UVA’s double standards in dispensing in-house justice when he represented Morgan Bettinger, Matan Goldstein and Matthew Carroll and reached a settlement in each case.
(Note to reporters who seem determined to draw a connection between Brown and the Jefferson Council: keyword search Morgan Bettinger, Matan Goldstein and Matthew Carroll on the Bacon’s Rebellion or Jefferson Council websites and you’ll see exactly what the connection was all about. While you’re visiting, take the trouble to familiarize yourself with the abuses Brown was addressing.)
We do know from its letters to UVA leadership that DOJ was frustrated by the university’s lack of responsiveness to its inquiries. But, frankly, we don’t know who was in charge at UVA. One naturally assumes that Ryan, as president, and Robert Hardie, as rector, were at the helm. However, we now know that “UVA” engaged outside counsel with higher-ed expertise to provide legal advice early in the controversy, and we don’t know who initiated that hire. We also know that UVA did compile information responsive to the DOJ requests but that it was routed through the Board of Visitors. Who, ultimately, was responsible for forwarding the legal responses to DOJ? Again, we don’t know.
We also know that DOJ and the Board of Visitors engaged in some kind of “negotiations” over Ryan’s fate. But we can only speculate what happened. We don’t even know who was doing the negotiating on UVA’s side or what their priorities were.
In his resignation remarks published in UVA Today, Ryan did say that UVA’s fate was “tied to me personally.”
“I could not in good conscience cause any real and direct harm to my colleagues and our students in order to preserve my own position,” he wrote. Remaining in his position and risking federal funding cuts “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.”
One possible interpretation is that Ryan had become a roadblock in seeking a resolution with DOJ. If that’s the case, we don’t know if it was DOJ or Board of Visitors leadership (most board members were out of the loop) that said he had to go.
One thing that Davis’ statement to the Faculty Senate makes clear is that the issues between DOJ and UVA were bigger than Ryan. UVA and DOJ are still hashing out a resolution to the issues DOJ raised over the course of seven letters addressed successively to university counsel Cliff iler, Ryan, Hardie, and ultimately Sheridan.
It goes without saying that Democrats will pay me no heed. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. Tempting though it would be to concoct a counter-narrative, I’m just waiting for the facts to come out. I suspect that the real story will be more complex, nuanced and interesting than portrayed so far.
