The Jefferson Council, a band of conservative-leaning University of Virginia alumni, was impatient and fed up.
For years, the group had railed against the university’s president, James E. Ryan, for his robust promotion of campus diversity initiatives.
They had counted on Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor who vocally opposed D.E.I., to force a new direction at one of the country’s most prestigious public universities. But as 2025, the final year of Mr. Youngkin’s term, began, the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus was still in place. And time was running out, with polls showing that the governor’s race would be an uphill battle for a Republican candidate.
But the Jefferson Council had a new ally in its campaign: President Trump.
In his first week in office, Mr. Trump signed executive orders banning federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which threatened any public and private universities receiving federal funds.
The Justice Department then hired a lawyer to help enforce those orders at the Office of Civil Rights: Gregory W. Brown, a University of Virginia alumnus and donor.
The Jefferson Council was well acquainted with Mr. Brown. As a lawyer in private practice, he had sued his alma mater on behalf of students claiming free speech violations or antisemitic harassment — cases referred to him by the council.
The Jefferson Council and the Office of Civil Rights separately denied in interviews that they had worked in concert. But the council had at least set the table for what came next. And in his new position, Mr. Brown helped engineer an unusual and concerted pressure campaign that would lead to Mr. Ryan’s resignation.
That campaign showed just how far the Office of Civil Rights — which had for decades been at the center of the fight for racial equality — would go to take on universities that it views as hostile to its new agenda. By issuing a stream of demands and threats, the office essentially sped past the university board, appointed by the governor, that has oversight of its flagship public university.
Efforts to reach Mr. Brown through the Justice Department were unsuccessful. Mr. Youngkin and the board leadership did not respond to interview requests. But Robert D. Holsworth, a longtime state political analyst who served on the board of another public institution, Virginia Commonwealth University, said that the Jefferson Council was pivotal in what he called a “coordinated” effort to unseat the president.
“These folks were just offended by everything Ryan did,” Dr. Holsworth said. “And they wound up accumulating enough power in the Trump administration and the Department of Justice to be able to impact the university in a way that they could never have done without Trump’s victory.”
Even some supporters of Mr. Trump’s higher education policies found the federal government’s role troubling.
“The goal of higher ed reform should not be the collection of scalps but the pursuit of principled, sustainable change,” Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute posted on social media, accusing the Office of Civil Rights of “overreach.”
But Joel Gardner, the Jefferson Council president, suggested in an interview that the ouster was history-making.
“What the Justice Department did was very similar to what President Eisenhower did,” Mr. Gardner said, comparing the Trump administration’s actions to the 1957 White House decision to dispatch troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education.
Frustration at the Jefferson Council
Mr. Youngkin took office in 2022 after campaigning on an education reform platform.
But changing university boards for the state’s 15 public institutions is a slow process. Board members appointed during the administration of Ralph Northam, Mr. Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, were still serving out their four-year terms.
By early 2025, Mr. Youngkin’s appointees had begun asserting themselves at some state universities, but the University of Virginia board would not completely change over until July 1. Even then, it was unclear whether the board would oust Mr. Ryan, who was a prodigious fund-raiser and popular among many students and faculty.
Still, in March, the Jefferson Council was upbeat, said Mr. Gardner, a retired investment banker. The university’s board had required the dismantling of D.E.I., and the governor had declared D.E.I. dead.
But within weeks, the council complained that Mr. Ryan was merely shifting titles around, slow-walking change.
Some officials did take on new, yet similar, titles. The vice president for diversity, for example, became the vice president for community engagement.
The Jefferson Council was irritated. It wanted D.E.I. jobs eliminated and had published an evaluation that concluded that the university employed 235 people in those positions, at a cost of about $20 million annually.
The University of Virginia said the payroll was closer to 55 people and $5.8 million a year. But there was little doubt that Mr. Ryan had wholeheartedly embraced D.E.I. programs that were intended to attract and retain students and faculty members from diverse backgrounds.
In April, the Jefferson Council took out a full-page ad in The Richmond Times-Dispatch with a cartoon depicting Mr. Ryan thumbing his nose at the governor.
“D.E.I. is not dead at U.Va,” the caption read. “D.E.I. won’t be dead or materially changed until there’s a change in leadership at U.Va.”
The council ran another ad in May, also calling for Mr. Ryan’s firing, and started a website, ResetUVA.com, focused on highlighting what it viewed as Mr. Ryan’s shortcomings.
Yet another website sponsored by the Jefferson Council, [email protected], posted videos of what it saw as Mr. Ryan’s defiance. In one meeting with faculty members, he promised that, despite the banning of D.E.I., the school would “end up in a good place.”
He added: “We are not walking away from our values.”
The Lawyer
Mr. Brown, who received his undergraduate degree in 1989, was a loyal and generous alumnus. And he was deeply attached to what is known as the Lawn, an iconic part of Thomas Jefferson’s original design for the university, which featured historic dorm rooms lining an expansive grassy yard.
In 2018, Mr. Brown pledged $335,000 to fund a scholarship in honor of his father, who had graduated from the medical school.
Later, when he endowed his dorm room on the Lawn, a campus publication featured him, posing in a off-white suit and explaining his devotion to what he called an “almost mystical place, living among men and women of character and integrity.”
That reverence for tradition, along with a willingness to mix it up with the administration, aligned with the mind-set of the Jefferson Council. And the group recommended his law firm to students who, they believed, had legitimate complaints against the university, according to Mr. Gardner, the council’s president.
One, Morgan Bettinger, faced reprimand by the university’s judiciary committee — a student-run group — following public backlash about offhand remarks she made in 2020 during a George Floyd protest. Mr. Ryan had declined to overturn the committee action.
Another undergraduate, Matan Goldstein, said the university had not done enough to prevent antisemitic harassment after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Mr. Brown took both those cases, suing the university in federal court and securing settlements, though the terms were not disclosed.
This year, the council announced that Mr. Brown would speak at its fourth annual spring meeting on April 8. As it turned out, Mr. Brown missed that engagement. He also stopped taking new clients effective at the end of March, according to his law firm’s website.
He was going to work for the Justice Department.
The Justice Department Steps In
Mr. Brown had been hired as a deputy to Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Ms. Dhillon graduated from the university’s law school and had served as co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, an advisory group to Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign. She was known for her activism, including filing a lawsuit accusing the University of California, Berkeley, of discriminating against conservative speakers.
In Mr. Brown’s job announcement, the Justice Department described his litigation work as redressing “egregious wrongdoing, primarily involving the manifest deprivation of fundamental civil rights by major public universities,” according to the Substack site LawDork.
Mr. Brown’s private practice gave him valuable insight, said Thomas M. Neale, a co-founder of the Jefferson Council.
“Because Greg Brown represented Matan and Morgan, I can bet you that a lot of the information he had was firsthand,” Mr. Neale said in a recent interview. “He represented two students who represent the perverse side of D.E.I. at U.Va.”
With the new administration in place, the University of Virginia began hearing from the Justice Department with unusual frequency, especially for what has traditionally been a slow, deliberative legal process.
On April 11 and 18, Ms. Dhillon’s office sent letters to the university, questioning whether it had complied with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions.
One letter requested five years of admissions data, including “applicant test scores, grade point average, extracurricular activities, essays and admissions outcomes, disaggregated by race and ethnicity.”
For a school with more than 17,500 undergraduates, as well as 50,000 applicants each year, it must have seemed an overwhelming task.
A third letter was dated April 28, the day after the Jefferson Council ran its ad criticizing Mr. Ryan in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. That letter, signed by Mr. Brown, echoed the ad, saying that the university had failed to follow through on the board’s directive to dismantle diversity programs.
A letter on May 2, sent by Ms. Dhillon and Mr. Brown, demanded a response to nine detailed questions about a complaint filed by a Jewish student who claimed that he had been bullied.
Three more letters from the Justice Department would follow in rapid succession.
“Time is running short and, the department’s patience is wearing thin,” said the last letter, dated June 17, assuming an unusually persistent tone for a normally slow-moving civil inquiry.
In the end, the Justice Department sent a total of seven letters, accusing the university of antisemitism and violations of federal mandates banning D.E.I. and race-based admissions preferences, according to documents released by the university.
There were other requests. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had privately demanded Mr. Ryan’s ouster to help resolve its investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Brown made the demand on several occasions to university officials and representatives, The Times reported.
Ms. Dhillon, in an interview with the Times, denied that her office had pressured the university to remove its president.
“I unequivocally deny that I or my colleagues made some sort of quid pro quo or demanded that Jim Ryan resign,” she said.
In an interview with CNN, Ms. Dhillon said: “I did express to leaders at U.Va. that we significantly lacked confidence” that Mr. Ryan would “be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of D.E.I.”
On June 27, Mr. Ryan resigned, in the hope, he said, of saving the school a gargantuan and costly Harvard-like battle with the government.
“I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this university,” he said in a note to the university community. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job.”
Mr. Youngkin thanked Mr. Ryan for his service, but issued no other statements. The two leaders of the university’s board, including a Youngkin appointee, expressed regret over his decision to resign.
“We share the sentiments of so many members of the university community who have expressed their sorrow about President Ryan’s resignation and their appreciation for his remarkable service to the institution.,” the statement said.
Other members of board were reluctant to talk. But Thomas DePasquale, a business executive who left the university board last year after two terms, argued that the leadership shake-up will undermine the university’s reputation.
“The governor should have stopped this,” said Mr. DePasquale, who was most recently appointed by Mr. Northam. “The Justice Department should not have made this a major issue. There’s nothing good that’s going to come.”
Mr. Brown, however, seemed to relish his victory.
After Mr. Ryan announced his resignation, Mr. Brown posted a photo of himself on X, savoring a cigar. The caption read, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the state motto of Virginia.
It means, “ever thus to tyrants.”
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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