Washington (AFP) – The head of a prestigious US public university resigned Friday amid pressure over his alleged failure to curb diversity programs, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war on academia. The Department of Justice had privately pressured the University of Virginia to fire its president to help resolve a probe of its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to the New York Times, which broke the story late Thursday. It had reportedly threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” UVA President Jim Ryan said in a statement Friday. Ryan wrote that risking federal funding cuts by staying in his role “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.”
Ryan took the helm of the elite University of Virginia in 2018, a year after white supremacists marched with flaming torches through its campus amid heated debate over the removal of some Confederate monuments in southern states. Ryan’s efforts to make the school more diverse and increase the number of first-generation university students reportedly rankled some conservative alumni.
“It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan — a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward — over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, said in statement.
Trump is attacking US universities and other sources of what he sees as left-leaning power in the country as he moves to exert unprecedented presidential control over life in America. A top area of conflict has been “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, programs that sought to correct historic demographic inequity in admissions and funding, but have been criticized as unfair to otherwise well-qualified candidates.
Trump notably piled pressure on Harvard University, seeking to ban it from having foreign students, slashing more than $3 billion in grants and contracts, and challenging its tax-free status. Some observers said Friday’s developments were an alarming sign for public universities, which are particularly reliant on state and federal funding. “Ryan’s resignation portends a future in which all public university presidents must conform to the political views of their state’s leadership or be kicked out of office,” wrote Inside Higher Ed, an online publication about education.
© 2024 AFP
