University of Virginia strikes deal to pause Trump administration investigations

The mounting pressure prompted James Ryan to announce his resignation as university president in June, saying the stakes were too high for others on campus if he opted to “fight the federal government in order to save my job.”

Unlike some universities' deals with the Trump administration, the Virginia agreement announced Wednesday does not include a fine or monetary payment, said Paul Mahoney, interim president of the university, in a campus email. Instead, the university agreed to follow the government’s anti-discrimination criteria. Every quarter, the university must provide relevant data showing compliance, personally certified by its president.

The deal, Mahoney wrote, preserves the university's academic freedom and doesn't hurt its attempts to secure federal research funding. And the university won't have external monitoring by the federal government beyond quarterly communications with the Department of Justice.

If Virginia complies, the Justice Department said it would officially end its investigations. If not, possible consequences include a fine or termination of federal funding.

Virginia’s settlement follows other agreements signed by Columbia and Brown universities to end federal investigations and restore access to federal funding. Columbia paid $200 million to the government, and Brown paid $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations.

Along with omitting a fine, Virginia’s agreement is less prescriptive than those signed by Columbia and Brown. The deal requires Virginia to adhere to four pages of terms, compared to nine at Brown and 22 at Columbia. It includes a clear affirmation of academic freedom, with an acknowledgement that the government “does not aim to dictate the content of academic speech or curricula.”

Although the college will adopt new federal definitions of discrimination in hiring, “we will also redouble our commitment to the principles of academic freedom, ideological diversity, free expression, and the unyielding pursuit of ‘truth, wherever it may lead,’” wrote Mahoney, quoting Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia.

As a public university, the University of Virginia was an outlier in the Trump administration’s effort to reform higher education according to the president’s vision. Previously, the administration had devoted most of its scrutiny to elite private colleges, including Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, accused of tolerating antisemitism.

Since then, the White House has expanded its campaign to other public campuses, including the University of California, Los Angeles, and George Mason University.

The Charlottesville campus became a flashpoint this year after conservative critics accused it of simply renaming its DEI initiatives rather than ending them. Much of the federal scrutiny had centered on complaints that Ryan, the college president who resigned in June, was too slow to implement a March 7 resolution by the university’s governing board demanding the eradication of DEI on campus. The Justice Department expanded the scope of its review several times and announced a separate investigation into alleged antisemitism in May.

Among the most prominent critics was America First Legal, a conservative group created by Trump aide Stephen Miller. In a May letter to federal officials, the group said Virginia had only moved to “rename, repackage and redeploy the same unlawful infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms.”

Similar accusations have embroiled George Mason University, where the governing board came to the defense of the president even as the Education Department cited allegations that he promoted diversity initiatives above credentials in hiring. On Aug. 1, the board unanimously voted to give President Gregory Washington a pay increase of 1.5%. The same day, the board approved a resolution forbidding DEI in favor of a “merit-based approach” in campus policies.

The University of Virginia deal with the Justice Department did not include one of the investigations the federal government had launched into the college. The Education Department had included the Charlottesville campus in a March 10 list identifying 60 universities that were under investigation for alleged antisemitism.

A department spokesperson said she could not confirm whether the investigation is still open because the agency’s Office for Civil Rights is furloughed during the government shutdown. She said the agreement does not resolve any department investigations.

Still, Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the Justice Department for pressing for “a renewed commitment to merit” at universities.

“The Trump Administration is not backing down in our efforts to root out DEl and illegal race preferencing on our nation’s campuses,” McMahon said in a post on X.

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