Report: DOJ Demands Ouster of UVA President

The Trump administration has reportedly demanded that the University of Virginia remove its president, James E. Ryan, as a condition for resolving a Justice Department probe into the school's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. The New York Times, citing people familiar with the discussions, reports that the Justice Department has warned university officials that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding are at risk due to what it describes as violations of civil rights law related to DEI programs. This marks the first known instance where the Trump administration has explicitly pressured a university to oust its leader in connection with federal investigations, per the Times.

The effort comes amid a wider campaign by the administration to limit DEI initiatives in higher education, with elite schools like Harvard also facing scrutiny from multiple federal agencies. Justice Department officials, including deputy assistant attorney general Gregory Brown—himself a UVA alumnus—told the university that Ryan hasn't sufficiently dismantled DEI programs and allegedly misrepresented the university's compliance efforts, according to the Times' sources. The administration feels "UVA decided to rebrand DEI and negotiated in bad faith," a source tells Axios.