University of Virginia reaches agreement to stop Trump administration investigations

WASHINGTON (AP) — The University of Virginia has agreed to comply with White House guidelines prohibiting discrimination in admissions and hiring, becoming the latest in a growing list of campuses to reach agreements with the Trump administration as the university seeks to halt months of scrutiny by the U.S. Justice Department.

The settlement was announced by the Department of Justice, which began investigating the admissions and financial aid processes at the Charlottesville campus in April. Federal officials accused Virginia’s president of failing to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices that President Donald Trump has called illegal discrimination.

The mounting pressure led James Ryan to announce his resignation as university president in June, saying there was too much at stake for others on campus if he chose to “fight the federal government to save my job.”

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

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The agreement, Mahoney wrote, preserves the university’s academic freedom and does not harm its attempts to secure federal funding for research. And the university will have no outside oversight from the federal government beyond quarterly communications with the Department of Justice.

If Virginia complies, the Justice Department said it would officially end its investigations.

The Virginia 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.

Some of the Justice Department letters took aim directly at Ryan, accusing him of engaging in “attempts to defy and evade federal anti-discrimination laws and the directives of his board.” Much of the federal scrutiny focused on complaints that Ryan took too long to implement a March 7 resolution by the university’s board of trustees calling for the eradication of DEI on campus.

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 universities, including Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, accused of tolerating anti-Semitism.

The White House has since 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. The Justice Department expanded the scope of its review several times and announced a separate investigation into alleged anti-Semitism in May.

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

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

The University of Virginia’s agreement with the Department of Justice did not include one of the investigations the federal government had launched into the university. The Department of Education had included the Charlottesville campus on a March 10 list that identified 60 colleges that were under investigation for alleged anti-Semitism.

A department spokeswoman said she could not confirm whether the investigation is still open because the agency’s Office of Civil Rights is suspended during the government shutdown. He said the settlement does not resolve any department investigation.

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