by Jaryn Crouson
The University of Virginia’s (UVA) faculty senate passed a no-confidence resolution Friday, blaming the school’s Board of Visitors for failing to protect the school from the Trump administration’s demands.
The faculty expressed disappointment that the board allowed external pressure to influence the university’s actions, which the board is supposed to prevent, according to the resolution. The resolution comes after the resignation of UVA’s president Jim Ryan, who the Trump administration allegedly pushed out due to his support of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
“The Faculty Senate expresses no confidence in the Board of Visitors for not protecting the University and its president from outside interference, and for not consulting with the Faculty Senate in a time of crisis, actions that are inconsistent with its duties under the Code of Virginia and the Board’s Statement of Visitor Responsibilities,” the senate wrote.
The resolution was passed in a 46-6 vote with eight abstentions. The senate is now calling on the board to relay a “full accounting” of the series of events that unfolded amid Ryan’s resignation, including all actions taken by the board.
UVA, the Board of Visitors and the faculty senate did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
While the resolution is merely symbolic, the action could lead to other devastating consequences, including the resignation or removal of university leaders.
The senate accused the board of allowing “outside influences” to “improperly to shape the governance of the University and the power of the president of the University to control the administrative direction of the institution,” after the board allegedly received letters from the DOJ threatening to withhold funding from the university if Ryan did not step down. The faculty said it was not made aware of the DOJ’s demands or any of the negotiations that occurred between the Trump administration and the board.
Ryan announced his resignation from UVA on June 27 and officially stepped down on July 11. Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly demanded the move to resolve an investigation into UVA’s supposed illegal use of DEI after it was accused of rebranding its offices instead of dismantling them entirely.
Under the Biden administration, universities spent millions on race-exclusionary DEI programs, some of which blatantly exacerbated race relations on campus. The Trump administration has since made it clear that such programs violate civil rights, and schools caught hosting such initiatives will be punished.
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Jaryn Crouson is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “University of Virginia Students” by University of Virginia.
Compliance with federal civil rights law is NOT OPTIONAL!
Democrats are always talking about democracy. But it seems to me that democrats do not care so much about democracy as they care about CONTROL. If you have ever thought about it, DEMOCRACY IS JUST MOB RULE. (Our Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 did not create a form of federal government that is a democracy, rather, they created a REPUBLIC in which all citizens, including the citizens of the political minority, also have rights.) If democrats really cared about democracy, they probably would be responding very differently to the results of last November’s national election than they are now doing.
The University of Virginia (UVa) faculty senate referred to in the article is merely an advisory body. It is the UVa Board of Visitors (BoV), which is appointed by the Governor (now a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, who is serving his final year as governor) and whose members are confirmed by the General Assembly of Virginia that is the primary policy making body for UVa.
UVa has become a very liberal place in the last approximately forty years. This leftist radicalization has accelerated in the last approximately twenty years, particularly so (in my opinion) during the presidencies of Teresa Sullivan {2010 to 2018} and James Ryan {2018 to 2025}.
Now that Ryan has been dismissed, the UVa faculty senate is trying to ‘pressure’ the BoV to nevertheless continue on with Ryan’s DEI and ‘woke’ radical leftist policies. This, as a matter of federal law, cannot be allowed to happen.
Ryan was a very likeable and capable president of UVa but as I have written in a comment to a recent Tennessee Star article about Ryan’s dismissal, Ryan ‘had to go’ for his intentional failure to comply with federal civil rights law.
What Ryan did at UVa sounds to me exactly like what the Tennessee Star is reporting about in its July 17, 2025 article concerning the actions of senior administrative leadership at Belmont University in Nashville regarding DEI and its various related ideological principles of ‘wokeism’.
In my opinion, the day that our country accepts DEI and its related and similar Marxist ideological principals which reject and replace merit-based evaluation principles of achievement and excellence will be the day that our country ceases to be ‘the land of the free’.