DEI BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL AS NOXIOUS
Did UVA eliminate DEI, or merely rebrand it?
For over a decade, successive UVA administrations spent millions of dollars building one of the most extensive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies in American higher education. A 2021 survey ranked UVA second among major universities in the number of DEI employees, and by 2024 was spending $20M on 235 positions. When these practices were found to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a landmark Supreme Court decision, the Board of Visitors unanimously voted to dismantle them. UVA later entered into a formal agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to do exactly that.
Even a cursory review of the current situation on Grounds suggests the reality is otherwise.
One administrator’s official biography still describes her job, in the present tense, as executing diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy — the same language from her previous role as the Senior Assistant Dean and Chief Community and Connection Officer. Her title has been scrubbed from the page. However, her payroll listing now reads Compliance Consultant. Her biography did not change. The page simply moved to a new address.
That detail captures, in microcosm, what a review of key DEI staffers, archived webpages, and salary records reveals about the scope of UVA’s restructuring: titles changed, office names changed, URLs changed. The people did not.
UVA has submitted two compliance certifications to the Department of Justice under an agreement running through 2028, and has spent at least $1.8 million in legal fees documenting the process. It is clear that UVA renamed its DEI offices. The real question is whether it substantively changed the underlying functions those offices performed — and whether what it told the Board of Visitors, the public, and ultimately the Department of Justice accurately describes what actually happened.
The Board’s Resolution and Its Mandates
On March 7, 2025, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors voted unanimously to dissolve the Division for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships. Governor Glenn Youngkin praised the move, declaring “DEI is done at UVA.” President Jim Ryan was instructed to report back to the Board within 30 days on compliance.
What criteria governed that compliance has never been publicly explained. FOIA requests by both the Jefferson Council and the Cavalier Daily for Ryan’s compliance report have been rebuffed under a “presidential correspondence” exemption. No explanation was given how a mandated report qualifies as correspondence.
The federal government was not satisfied with what it saw. On April 28, 2025, the Department of Justice placed UVA on notice for failing to comply with federal civil rights laws and directed the university to certify, with “precision and particularity,” that every school, division, and department had eliminated programs violating the Board’s mandate.
Between April and June 2025, UVA received seven separate letters from the DOJ Civil Rights Division. In October 2025, UVA entered into an agreement with the DOJ — the first of its kind with a public university — pausing five ongoing investigations in exchange for quarterly compliance reports through December 2028. UVA submitted its first certification in December 2025. Its second followed in March 2026.
What those reports contain, and what they omit, is examined below.
The Personnel Record
What follows is a documented comparison of only six of the numerous administrators whose titles changed following the Board’s March 2025 resolution, drawn from archived university webpages, current live university pages, and publicly available salary data. In each case, the same individual remained at UVA under a different title. In no case has UVA publicly described what, if anything, these administrators stopped doing.
The combined salaries of these six administrators alone exceed $1.5 million — more, by most estimates, than ten tenured associate professors earn in the College of Arts and Sciences. This is representative of the bloated administrative absurdity behind faculty pay grievances and increased tuition that has reached levels difficult to justify. What exactly are these renamed vice presidents and deans of “community” doing that warrants two to three times a tenured professor’s salary?
Case by Case
Kevin McDonald is the most senior example. He joined UVA in 2019 as Vice President for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Partnerships. Today, UVA lists him as Vice President for Community Engagement and Equal Opportunity. His former bio still listed his DEI position until at least October 6, 2025. His current biography makes no mention of the word “diversity,” and his previous DEI-related employment has been removed. How does his role substantively differ from that as head of DEI? What value is he adding to the University’s educational mission?
Rachel Spraker previously held the title of Assistant Vice President for Equity and Inclusive Excellence. By May 14, 2025, Spraker’s title had changed to Assistant Vice President for Community Wellbeing and Equal Opportunity within the Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights. Both biographies open with identical language: “The AVP provides leadership and guidance to the University community on a broad range of activities in support of inclusive excellence at the University.” The title changed. The job descriptions appear substantively the same.
Tracy Downs at UVA Health represents a case where the timing is documented with particular precision. He was appointed in 2021 following a national search as the inaugural Chief Diversity and Community Engagement Officer. That title appeared on the UVA Health website through at least February 14, 2025. On March 18, 2025 — eleven days after the Board vote — the URL for his position page began redirecting to a new page titled Chief Community Engagement and Health Outcomes Officer. The Wayback Machine captured the redirect on the day it happened. His current biography describes him as UVA Health’s “leading voice on community collaboration, improved access, and health outcomes” — instead of UVA Health’s “leading voice on diversity, equity, and inclusion.” How his responsibilities differ, UVA has not explained.
Meara Habashi led DEI efforts at the School of Engineering and Applied Science as Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She is now listed as Associate Dean for Community, Opportunity and Engagement in Engineering. Archived pages from February 2025 show the Engineering school’s DEI page under the heading “Diversity, Equity and Engagement,” including a distinct “Center for Diversity in Engineering.” Those no longer exist but the Office of Community, Opportunity, and Engagement came into existence around June 13, 2025. Once again, how does the Community Engagement agenda differ from the DEI agenda? Same person, different title.
Christie Julien presents perhaps the most striking evidence of the gap between UVA’s public representations and its administrative record. Julien joined the Darden School in 2019 as Assistant Dean for Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. After the Board’s resolution, the office she led was renamed, the URL changed, and her title was scrubbed from her biography page. Her payroll listing now reads “Compliance Consultant.” What did not change was the biography itself, which still describes her role in the present tense using the language, responsibilities, and reporting structure of her former DEI position.
Mark Christopher Jefferson at the Law School offers the most compressed version of the pattern. He held the title of Assistant Dean for Community Engagement and Equity. His current title, changed as of May 28, 2025, is Assistant Dean for Community Engagement. One focus word — “Equity” — was removed. His current biography describes him as “responsible for strengthening and advancing the school’s commitment to being a welcoming and supportive institution in which every member — including students, faculty and staff — can thrive as individuals and as members of our community” whereas in his previous role he was “responsible for strengthening and advancing the school’s commitment to being a diverse and equitable institution in which every member — including students, faculty and staff — feels an equal sense of belonging.” Does removing one word change anything? Isn’t this really just a riff on Shakespeare’s “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?”
The Vocabulary of Substitution
The title changes follow a discernible pattern, replacing a consistent set of terms with a consistent set of replacements. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” typically became “Community Engagement.” “Equity” became “Wellbeing” or disappeared entirely. “Inclusive Excellence,” “Advocacy and Opportunity,” and “Belonging” appeared as substitute framings across schools and units. These are not the substitutions of an institution that accepted that the underlying work had been prohibited. They are the substitutions of an institution determined to continue its own agenda and believing that it can employ the ruse of new labels to survive administrative and legal scrutiny.
The Questions UVA Didn’t Want Asked
During the June 2025 quarterly Board meeting — three months after the resolution — member Doug Wetmore raised a concern about eliminating DEI: “For me, the budget doesn’t meet the mark this year. I mentioned DEI earlier. We got a letter from the governor asking us to make sure we are especially careful to extract those expenses from the operating budget at the University, both in the administrative overhead level and in the school units, and I’m not really seeing much detail around that.” The university’s COO replied that she was “wildly disappointed” he had raised it at all, adding that “there’s a fine line between governance and management.” She did not provide detail. Budget presentations from that meeting and from June 2026 make no mention of DEI. Wetmore was eventually asked to resign by Governor-elect Spanberger one day before she took office.
The most direct evidence, however, did not come from a Board meeting. It came from a recording.
Several UVA staffers were captured on video explaining how they were “changing the names a little bit, so like it doesn’t bring scrutiny on the office and stuff like that” and that “all of our affinity programs are basically finding ways to, like, kind of move under the radar.”
That video emerged in late October 2025 — mere days after UVA entered its compliance agreement with the Department of Justice. UVA’s response? “These “individuals are sharing their own views and that they are not representing official University policies or positions” and that the "content captured does not relate in any way to the agreement." Despite this supposed discrepancy, Davon Lewis, one of the named staffers, is still currently employed at UVA in the same position.
Weeks after that incident, UVA submitted its first compliance certification to the Department of Justice.
What the Compliance Reports Disclose — and Don’t
UVA’s compliance reports, submitted in December 2025 and March 2026, describe real changes. Diversity-related language was removed from admissions materials. The School of Medicine eliminated a statement that it aimed to build a “diverse student body.” McIntire’s graduate admissions prompt was revised to remove references to race, gender, and background. At Darden, scholarship award decisions are now made “without consideration of race, color, national origin, sex or other protected characteristics.” These are substantive updates to language and formal processes.
What the reports do not disclose, based on publicly available records, is whether the day-to-day responsibilities of the numerous former DEI administrators have changed in any material respect. What exactly are these people doing? And have the multi millions of dollars being spent on DEI related programs been reduced or just laundered into substantively similar endeavors?
Conclusion
It is no longer a question of whether UVA renamed its DEI administrators and offices. It clearly did — systematically, and in some cases within days of the Board’s vote. But the real issue is whether there was only a change of labels not of functions. It certainly appears that way.
UVA has certified twice to the Department of Justice that it is complying in good faith. One has to reasonably question whether the Justice Department is being played the fool.
The answer matters beyond Charlottesville. UVA’s October 2025 agreement was the first the DOJ struck with a public university. How federal officials evaluate its compliance — whether renaming a position satisfies a mandate to eliminate it — will shape what every other university must actually do.