29 News: UVA releases its first quarterly civil rights report to the Department of Justice
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The University of Virginia has released its first quarterly civil rights report to the Department of Justice, as part of an agreement the university signed in October in order to suspend federal investigations into diversity, equity, and inclusion on Grounds.
The six-page document, signed by Interim President Paul Mahoney and submitted to the Justice Department on December 29, 2025, marks the first in a series of reports that UVA is required to send to the federal government to demonstrate its good-faith efforts to comply. According to a spokesperson for UVA, the university waited until now to release the report because President Scott Beardsley needed a chance to review it.
The report mostly includes a detailed list of actions UVA has taken to review and/or change DEI policies within programs, admissions, recruitment, hiring, and other processes. It first points to UVA’s dissolution of its DEI office last February and the corresponding effort to remove “DEI branded programming” across academic and administrative units, as well as public-facing communications, such as websites.
Next, the report points to specific actions that have been taken in the School of Medicine, the Medical Center, the School of Nursing, and the McIntire School of Commerce. The list includes - but is not limited to - revising admissions language in student applications; ending partnerships with external organizations that are “exclusively focused on communities or populations based on... protected characteristics”; revising and/or eliminating implicit bias trainings; and eliminating entire programs that existed under the now-shuttered DEI Office, including the Justice, Equity, Inclusion Strategists Education Program in the Medical Center.
UVA says the ongoing compliance review is in direct response to a resolution that the Board of Visitors passed on March 7, which ordered a review of DEI in the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order, entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
In mid-June, the law firm McGuire Woods began overseeing the compliance effort and, according to UVA, began to “make suggestions for how to better align policies, programs and practices with civil rights law and related federal orders and guidance.”
The review is now taking place in stages and will cover all 12 schools at UVA, meaning the next quarterly reports to the Justice Department will likely include updates on compliance efforts within other schools. It’s the information UVA has acquired through this review that informed most of the quarterly report it just submitted to the DOJ.
While UVA says its compliance review does not investigate professors’ research or what they teach, UVA Faculty Senate Chair Jeri Seidman says it still has a chilling effect on the overall atmosphere.
“I think the biggest effect of the compliance review has been more a pervasive sense of fear more than that there were dramatic changes that needed to be made,” Seidman told 29News.
Ian Mullins, a UVA professor and a member of the United Campus Workers of Virginia at UVA, agrees.
“There’s been a significant amount of harm,” Mullins said. “A lot of it has come from the uncertainty, not knowing what you can and cannot teach, what you can and cannot say, but also from administrators applying pressure on what kind of content is taught and how it’s taught in classes.”
Joel Gardner, President of the alumni group the Jefferson Council, sees the first quarterly report to the DOJ differently.
“What this says to me in an overall sense is how deeply discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and ethnicity had insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of life on the Grounds,” Gardner told 29News.
Gardner also responded directly to the concern among faculty about the subject of their research and courses, saying the “real fear” existed under former presidents Terri Sullivan and Jim Ryan.