Before James Ryan stepped down as president of the University of Virginia last month, the Department of Justice accused him and other leaders of actively attempting to “defy and evade federal antidiscrimination laws.” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said that needed to change.
“Dramatic, wholesale changes are required, now, to repair what appears to be a history of clear abuses and breaches of our nation’s laws and our Constitution by the University of Virginia under its current administration,” she wrote.
In a series of seven letters obtained by Inside Higher Ed via an open records request, Dhillon and other Department of Justice officials laid out their increasingly aggressive case that the university was at risk of losing federal funding, just as Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities had in the months prior for allegations of antisemitism. The Cavalier Daily first published the letters in full.
Taken together, the letters sent between April 11 and June 17 were used to launch what the DOJ called an investigation but that legal experts say is among the latest instances in an all-out pressure campaign against higher education.
Dhillon and the DOJ have defended their actions, stating multiple times that they did not explicitly call for Ryan’s resignation.
But now, with similar investigations launched against George Mason University (also located in Virginia), many onlookers view these letters as a template for how President Trump will continue to leverage federal funding to impose his priorities on colleges and universities across the country—altering who is admitted and what is taught and by whom. Higher education experts say it’s an aggressive tactic that will create a climate of uncertainty for years to come.
“There is not much pushback that that administrators—President Ryan or others—can make, if they want to continue receiving these funds and performing the research that they do,” said Brandt Hill, a partner and litigator with the higher education practice group of Thompson Coburn LLP. “This is all about collecting scalps that [the Trump administration] can then publicize. Each time Trump gets a win, that gives it a snowball effect and gives the impression that he can do it elsewhere.”
Here is a copy of each letter and three key takeaways about what the letters say.
Expanding Reach of Affirmative Action Ban
At the crux of the department’s demands outlined in the letters is the claim that UVA has failed to provide equal opportunity and has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.
To justify the allegations, the letters repeatedly cite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which barred colleges from considering race in admissions, as well as President Trump’s executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion, which aim to expand the high court’s ruling to all campus scholarships and programs.
Compliance with the Civil Rights Act as well as the administration’s interpretation of Supreme Court’s ruling and the president’s orders, Dhillon states, “is not optional.”
“Moreover,” the June 16 letter states, “you will certainly recall Attorney General of Virginia Jason Miyares’ admonition that the UVA Board of Visitors and the president of the university are public officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia who owe fiduciary duties and duties of loyalty first and foremost to the Commonwealth, not the interests or ideologies of university administrators or faculty members.”
And while the department does have the grounds to investigate a possible consideration of race in admissions, extrapolating that to scholarships and other aspects of campus life does not have the same legal backing and precedent, higher ed legal experts said. In February, the Education Department attempted to extend the ban to cover all race-based programming and activities, but a federal judge blocked that guidance in April.
Jodie Ferise, a partner at Church Church Hittle + Antrim, a higher education–focused law firm in Indiana, noted that the second sentence of the April 11 letter describes the alleged racial discrimination as “immoral.” That’s not by accident, she said.
“It’s a barely disguised method of pandering to a constituency that no longer has a particular political issue to cling to” when they vote, as the Supreme Court did bar colleges from using affirmative action, Ferise said. “We’re holding up actions that heretofore have been looked at as very moral things, like trying to have more doctors or lawyers of color or women in engineering … Now, to frame them as being very immoral is really an interesting thing to do.”
Sweeping Demands Created Pressure
In addition to new and untested legal interpretations, the DOJ’s letters are also unprecedented in the breadth and urgency of their demands.
Typically, a letter from the department would follow a specific complaint and be more narrow, legal experts explained. But in this case, DOJ officials begin with vague allegations and make sweeping requests that would be difficult—if not impossible—for a university to comply with in a limited amount of time.
For example, in the first two letters in which the Trump administration asks UVA to certify its compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA v. Harvard, DOJ officials gave university administrators just two weeks to collect and submit “any and all relevant documents guiding your admissions policies and procedures.” Additionally the assistant attorney general asks for “all admissions data for the past five academic years, including applicant test scores (SAT/ACT), GPA, extracurricular activities, essays, and admission outcomes, disaggregated by race and ethnicity,” as well as “any and all relevant documents about your policies and procedures relating to scholarships, financial assistance, or other benefits programs.”
In the third letter, sent April 28, DOJ officials expanded the list of demands to include all DEI programming.
“The department says it hasn’t reached any conclusions regarding the University of Virginia’s liability, but I don’t think the department ever really planned to make any final conclusions or planned to receive all the documents and carry out an exhaustive investigation,” said Hill from Thompson Coburn.
The deadline was later extended by one week, but multiple sources said that still wouldn’t be enough time. And it wasn’t until the fourth letter, sent May 2, that DOJ officials first cited a direct complaint. (The complaint officials referred to was focused on antisemitism, not racial discrimination.)
John Pistole, former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and president emeritus of Anderson University, said he was shocked by how “aggressive” the DOJ was “right out of the gate.” The Trump administration, he added, is likely trying to “bury” colleges in “discovery, basically—motions, if you will.”
Although the letters do give UVA officials a chance to comply voluntarily by making changes to the university’s campus policies and programs with no penalty, the threat of losing access to federal aid places an abnormal pressure on the institution, Pistole and others said.
“At what point does all the negativity associated with that become a bargaining chip for the DOJ?” he asked. “At what point does it make sense to say, ‘OK, you win and we’ll comply?’”
Up until the sixth letter, sent June 16, DOJ officials addressed both the university’s president and its board, but after that, only the board is listed as a recipient. The letter states that “Ryan and his proxies are making little attempt to disguise their contempt and intent to defy these fundamental civil rights and governing laws.” DOJ officials never explicitly requested Ryan’s resignation.
“I don’t think the Department of Justice wants to put that threat on the table in a formal letter, because I’m not even aware that there is any such kind of authority to force a president to resign,” said Hill. “But the undertone here is that President Ryan needs to be ousted or else this is going to continue.”
No Clear DEI Definition
Moving forward, legal experts say, the key question will be whether the DOJ has the authority to probe DEI programs on campus.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the president’s executive order at the heart of the investigations. A district judge blocked the order, but an appeals court overturned that national injunction in March.
“The whole problem here is no one really has a clear understanding of what DEI extends to,” Hill said. “Until there is some more definitive interpretation, perhaps by the Supreme Court, then federal agencies are going to continue to carry out the president’s ideological view.”
But in the meantime, what colleges will deal with, Pistole said, is tension over federal funding and a precarious relationship with the government, regardless of who is in charge.
“Most boards are focused on, how do we best resolve this and get out of the bull’s-eye, because nobody wants to be the focus of intense, persistent scrutiny by a government agency that has the ability to impact your livelihood,” he said. “And the concern is for not just this administration, but what happens in the next administration—whoever it is, fill in the blank. If the policies are changed dramatically by the new administration, that reliability, predictability and the autonomy of higher education would be disrupted.”
