UVA president resigns

From The New York Times: James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, is resigning under pressure from the Justice Department:

The University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, has told the board overseeing the school that he will resign in the face of demands by the Trump administration that he step aside to help resolve a Justice Department inquiry into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

For the leader of one of the nation’s most prominent public universities to take such an extraordinary step demonstrates President Trump’s success in harnessing the investigative powers of the federal government to accomplish his administration’s policy goals....

Mr. Ryan, the university’s ninth president, has held that post since 2018 and was unanimously approved for another contract in 2022. During his seven years in the job, Mr. Ryan developed a reputation as a champion of diversity. He encouraged community service and helped drive an increase in the number of first-generation students.

He summed up his philosophy as one aimed at making the university “both great and good,” describing his goal of striving for academic excellence in a manner that would benefit society. But that rankled conservative alumni and some Republican board members, who accused him of imposing his own ethics and values on college students.

Our household heard James Ryan speak in 2016, when he was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dean Ryan’s talk at that year’s HGSE diploma ceremony became the stuff of a book, Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions. The questions are six:

Wait, what?
I wonder why, or if?
Couldn’t we at least?
How can I help?
What really matters?

And a “bonus” question, from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” (Slightly misquoted as “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”) Listen or read, and you can tell that James Ryan is a good guy.

And now we have to ask, Wait, what? A president and his minions have taken down yet another university president?

A related post
HGSE’s speech at Open Culture