A Tired Ryan Contemplates a Difficult Future
When University of Virginia President Jim Ryan appeared in a WVIR-TV interview in late January, he seemed fatigued. His brow was deeply furrowed and his face, already lean from marathon training, wore an expression of perpetual worry.
The last few months have been the most trying time in Ryan’s six-and-a-half-year tenure. After enjoying tremendous initial success in implementing his priorities at UVA, he is now mired in endless controversies which threaten to unravel his legacy.
In his early years under Democratic governors and a friendly Board of Visitors, Ryan advanced a sweeping “great and good” overhaul of the University based on the principles of social justice and equity: publication of the Racial Equity Task Force report, renaming of the Alderman Library, removal of the George Rogers Clarke statue, erection of a monument to enslaved laborers, expansion of a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy, imposition of DEI statements, steering tens of millions of dollars toward the recruitment of minority students, grad students and faculty, the stacking of faculty with far-left professors, and much more.
It all came easily. Ryan was popular with students and faculty, the Board was cooperative, alumni were somnambulent, and after the 2020 George Floyd protests, he was in sync with the national vibe.
But the vibe has changed, and the past few months have been a strain.
Although Ryan managed to fend off the release of a potentially embarrassing report into the triple murder of three football players until later this year, two more investigations — one into alleged abuses at the UVA Medical Center and one into the breakup of a pro-Palestinian encampment last spring — are underway. Meanwhile, an NCAA ruling means UVA will have to find tens of millions of dollars to pay student athletes, even as it has to replace popular basketball coach Tony Bennett. Adding to his woes, Ryan is losing his righthand man and DEI champion Provost Ian Baucom, who is departing to become president of Middlebury College just as the newly inaugurated Trump administration has launched a war on DEI. Most ominous of all, Ryan can no longer count on the compliance of the Board, 13 of 17 of whose members have been appointed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.
There have been few big headlines coming out of the University of Virginia so far in the new year, but a lot is going on behind the scenes. Most recently, the Board of Visitors has scheduled a special session Feb. 25 to discuss the findings of an independent investigation into alleged management abuses at the UVA Medical Center and School of Medicine. After an initial furor of publicity over allegations leveled in a letter signed by 128 UVA physicians, that investigation has been kept under tight wraps and the proceedings have been invisible to the public.
Word of the special board meeting was conveyed to the UVA Faculty Senate last month by letter from board members Rachel Sheridan and Porter Wilkinson, who are overseeing the investigation staffed by Williams & Connolly, a Washington, D.C., law firm.
“The special meeting will allow for Williams & Connolly to share its findings ahead of the regularly scheduled Board meeting on March 6, during which we anticipate there will be further discussion,” stated the letter. “The Board is committed to evaluating the results of the investigation with the utmost care and consideration.”
Sheridan and Wilkinson described the investigation into the allegations as “very thorough” and “exhaustive and intensive.”
The WVIR reporter asked Ryan about the investigations as well as the challenges to the UVA athletics program.
“In a job like this, you necessarily have to make some hard calls,” Ryan said. “When you make hard calls, you’re going to disappoint some people.”
When asked about what a future president will have to solve that he could not, Ryan said, in a stab at self-deprecating humor, “Probably clean up all of the messes I made.”
Although his contract doesn’t expire until July 31, 2028, Ryan seemed willing to ponder a UVA without him. “I think that the next president will absolutely have to focus on the core of what we do,” he said. “That is the most important part of the job. Beyond that, my experience is that you know there’s going to be something, but you have no idea what it’s going to be.”
It won’t be long before he finds out. Several Youngkin appointees on the board are eager to rein in the DEI apparatus, shrink administrative staff, reduce tuition, and press aggressively for free speech and intellectual diversity.
The Youngkin administration restrained his appointees’ activism to avoid triggering Democratic legislators with the power to reject his latest five board nominees. Once those nominations are locked in, the Board will have the political latitude to put the squeeze on Ryan. Come July 1, Youngkin will nominate four more board members and most of Ryan’s remaining allies on the board will rotate off.
As the saying goes, it’s lonely at the top.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
