The Firing of Jim Ryan

By Eli Lerdau. All photos taken by Eli Lerdau

This past week, Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, resigned. On its face, this was a resignation, but in reality it was political execution. After weeks of pressure from the Trump-controlled Department of Justice and escalating threats from a Republican appointed Board of Visitors, Ryan was made to walk the plank. His crime? Refusing to capitulate to a regime obsessed with purging higher education of anything that reflects the truth of this nation, western society, and the world as a whole. The story does not begin this week, but begins months ago when President Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting public universities. These orders demanded the eradication of so-called “DEI” and “woke” programming. However, what Trump defines as “woke” is telling. Anything that affirms queer life, speaks honestly about American history, or dares to explore the failures of Western society is labeled “woke.” Truth itself has been made a target.

Jim Ryan outside his home speaking to marchers.

Ryan’s resignation was first reported by the New York Times, which confirmed on Friday that he had moved up his departure from the end of the academic year to immediately. The pressure around him had become unbearable. For over a month the DOJ circled UVA like a vulture, but the situation worsened in recent weeks. In a letter first obtained by the Times, two UVA alumni, now leading the GOP’s crusade against their alma mater, wanted that the university could lose federal funding unless it eradicated “race-based treatment” and ceased “illegal” race-based admissions. The threat was clear, if the university refused, it would be starved. UVA’s world-renowned hospital would lose critical funding, jobs would be slashed and the institution itself could collapse. Faced with a fiscal hostage scenario, Jim Ryan did what those with power rarely do, he sacrificed himself for the greater good.

UVA is one of the top public universities in the nation. For decades, it has stood as a beacon of intellectual rigor while also maintaining one of the best hospitals on the East Coast. Ryan only grew this status. Since assuming his role in 2018 he raised over five billion dollars, recruited world-class faculty, and sought not just to maintain excellence, but to wield it in the service of the public good. He embodied a philosophy in which the university’s purpose was not solely prestige, but justice. This philosophy made him an enemy of conservatives, who despised his success as president. With Trump’s return to power, the right saw its chance to not only weaken Ryan but decapitate a symbol of what a public university can be when it stands for something.

This is about more than one resignation, it is about the systematic dismantling of higher education by a regime that understands the threat of a liberated mind. The Republican project is not to reform universities, it is to destroy them. Tyrants throughout history have known that education is the first enemy of despotism. Dictators have always targeted higher education early on, whether Hitler and Stalin the 1930s or Pinochet in the 1970s. The goal of Trump is not just to erase Jim Ryan or defund Harvard, it is to sever the critical arteries of enlightenment that give life to American democracy.

Thus we are led to the bitter irony of this attack happening at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. While Jefferson was without a doubt a complex and flawed figure, he saw education as a bulwark against tyranny. He wrote that education was the “only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty” and that UVA must be “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” That freedom cannot coexist under a government that crushes dissent and removes leaders for refusing to betray principle. The forced resignation of Jim Ryan is not policy, it is simple political retribution. It is tyranny, plain as day, and tyranny of this clarity demands a response. 

Marchers stand on the steps of the Rotunda holding signs in support of Mr. Ryan and against the DOJ, BOV, and Donald Trump.

On the day of Ryan’s resignation hundreds gathered in protest. They chanted “we want Jim” and notably “Death to tyrants,” a reword of Virginia’s state motto Sic Semper Tyrannis, or “Thus always to tyrants”, serving as not only a slogan, but as a mandate. It calls upon the people to resist tyranny whenever it appears, no matter who wears the crown. And tyranny has now appeared, here in Charlottesville, in Washington, and across our nation. Governor Youngkin and the Virginia GOP have chosen complicity. They could have defended the university, they could have defended freedom, but instead they bowed to Trump. They betrayed not just the students and faculty of UVA, but the very ideals they pretend to revere. And so, if they will not defend us and our institutions, we must. If they will not rise for truth, we must rise twice as tall. If they will not speak, then the people must roar.