The President of the University of Virginia resigns under pressure from the US government | Donald Trump News

The president of the University of Virginia resigned from his post under pressure from the Department of Justice of the United States, which has put pressure for his departure in the practices of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) of the school.

Friday, in an email sent to the university community and circulated on social networks, the president of the University James Ryan said that he resigns to protect the institution against the anger of the government.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” he wrote.

“To do it would not only be quixotic, but seem selfish and egocentric 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 selected visas.”

The resignation of Ryan was accepted by the board of directors, two sources said at the New York Times, which first broke the story. You don’t know exactly when he leaves his post.

His departure is the last indication of the current tensions between the administration of President Donald Trump and the university community.

During his second term, President Trump has more and more sought to reshape education By attacking diversity initiatives, putting pressure on repression on demonstrators of pro-Palestinian students and looking for exams of job and registration practices.

Ryan’s departure marks a new border in a campaign that has almost exclusively Targeted Ivy league Schools. Critics also say that this shows a change in the justification of the government, far from the allegations of anti -Semitism crawling on the campus and towards a more aggressive police of diversity initiatives.

Just a day before, the Ministry of Justice announced it would investigate Another public school, the University of California, for its use of diversity standards.

Ryan, who has managed the University of Virginia since 2018, has been criticized that he had not taken into account federal orders to eliminate Dei’s policies.

An anonymous source told the Associated Press news agency that its withdrawal had been pushed by the Ministry of Justice as a means of helping to resolve an investigation targeting the school.

Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, called Ryan’s Wonter an example of the Trump administration using “Duvile instead of a rational speech”.

“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more,” said Mitchell. “It is clear that the administration is not finished and will use all the tools it can make or invent to exercise its will in relation to higher education.”

Virginia Democratic senators react

In a joint declaration, the Senators of Virginia, the two Democrats, said that it was scandalous that the Trump administration demanded the resignation of Ryan on the “traps of the cultural war”.

“This is an error that harms Virginia’s future,” said senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

After campaigning on a promise to end the “unlocking” in education, Trump signed a decree in January calling for the end of federal funding which would support educational establishments with Programming Dei.

He accused schools of indoctrinating “children in radical and anti-American ideologies” without the authorization of their parents.

The Ministry of Education has since opened surveys on dozens of colleges, arguing that diversity initiatives discriminated against American white and Asian students.

The school response was dispersed. Some have closed the DEI offices, ended with diversity scholarships and no longer require diversity declarations within the framework of the hiring process. However, others have firm on diversity policies.

The University of Virginia has become a flash point after conservative criticism accused him of simply renouncing his Dei initiatives. The school director voted to close the DEI office in March and put an end to diversity policies in admissions, hiring, financial aid and other areas.

Republican governor Glenn Youngkin celebrated the action, declaring that “Dei is done at the University of Virginia”.

But America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump’s help, Stephen Miller, said that Dei had simply taken another form at school. In a letter in May to the Ministry of Justice, the group said that the University had chosen to “rename, recondition and redeploy the same illegal infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms”.

The group directly targeted Ryan, noting that he had joined hundreds of other college presidents in the signing of a public declaration condemning “the excessive and political interference” of the Trump administration.

Friday, the group said that it would continue to use all the tools available to eliminate what it called discriminatory systems.

“This week’s developments are clear: public universities that accept federal funds do not have a license to violate the Constitution,” said Megan Redshaw, group’s lawyer, in a statement. “They cannot impose ideological loyalty tests, apply breed and sex preferences, or challenge legal executive authority.”

So far, the White House had attracted most of its attention to Harvard University and other elite institutions that Trump considers bastions of liberalism.

Harvard lost more than $ 2.6 billion in federal research subsidies in the midst of his battle with the government, which also tried to prevent school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax exemption status.

Harvard and his endowment of $ 53 billion are particularly well placed to withstand the government’s financial pressure.

However, public universities depend much more on taxpayers’ money and could be more vulnerable. The endowment of $ 10 billion from the University of Virginia is among the most important for public universities, while the vast majority have much less.