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WASHINGTON: The University of Virginia has agreed to abide by White House guidance forbidding discrimination in admissions and hiring, becoming the latest in a growing list of campuses striking deals with the Trump administration as the college tries to pause months of scrutiny by the US Justice Department.
The agreement was announced by the Justice Department, 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 President Donald Trump has labeled as unlawful discrimination.
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.
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.
Some of the Justice Department’s letters squarely took aim at Ryan, accusing him of engaging in “attempts to defy and evade federal anti-discrimination laws and the directives of your board.” Much of the federal scrutiny centered on complaints that Ryan was too slow to implement a March 7 resolution by the university’s governing board demanding 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 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. 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 percent. 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.