CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Former University of Virginia president Jim Ryan, in a 12-page letter to Faculty Senate Friday, detailed the circumstances of his resignation, saying the Department of Justice and the incoming rector of the Board of Visitors forced him out of his post by threatening funding to the school.

Ryan indicated that incoming BOV rector Rachel Sheridan and incoming vice rector Porter Wilkinson worked with the DOJ and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, without the knowledge of the current BOV rector Robert Hardie or many other board members, to engineer his ouster.

Calling the entire ordeal “surreal and bewildering,” Ryan said he was told, by Sheridan, that UVA had a written agreement with the Trump Administration that would have ended the DOJ inquiries if Ryan resigned, but no such agreement surfaced in the time following his June resignation.

“The only offer on the table was that I needed to resign by 5 p.m. that day (June 26) or the DOJ would basically rain hell on UVA,” Ryan wrote in his letter, a copy of which was obtained by Cville Right Now. “I also needed my resignation to be effective prior to the students returning. If I did not resign that day, I was told that the DOJ would extract/block hundreds of millions of dollars from UVA before they would even negotiate.”

Ryan said he was told by Sheridan not to go public with the federal government’s threats, leaving it unclear to Ryan the true source of those threats.

“What is not clear to me, however, is whether the threat was real, or whether the idea came from the Board members who spoke with the DOJ lawyers, our own lawyers, the Governor, or some combination of that group,” Ryan wrote.

A spokesman for the university did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Sheridan’s involvement in the negotiations that led to Ryan’s resignation.

Ryan’s resignation became public the next day, June 27. Paul Mahoney took over as interim president on Aug. 11. He has since resolved all outstanding DOJ investigations into the university, the final five ending when Mahoney and the Board of Visitors agreed to a deal with the Trump Administration pledging continued compliance with federal policies and promising to send the DOJ quarterly reports confirming that compliance for the next three years.

Ryan’s letter said he was told if he did not resign, he would be fired the next day. Ryan said he was counseled by a colleague, “If you don’t have any Board support, it’s over. You can’t fight this on your own.”

Ryan said he began writing the letter in the days following his resignation, to make sure he correctly detailed the timeline while the information was “fresh in my mind.”

Ryan said trouble began at a March BOV meeting when the school received a resolution, drafted by Gov. Youngkin’s office, one that was “quite sweeping and filled with inflammatory rhetoric criticizing DEI, much of it lifted from President Trump’s executive order.”

Eventually, the Board passed a toned-down version of that resolution.

Ryan said Gov. Youngkin created confusion by appearing on FOX News that night, declaring “‘DEI is dead’ at UVA.”

Ryan said that, while the university had agreed to dissolve its DEI office, it had not abandoned the principles of diversifying its student body and staff, nor did it have plans to stop practices recognizing and respecting existing diversity on campus.

“Did it mean that we could no longer try to recruit qualified first-generation students from rural parts of Virginia, or offer financial aid, or even serve matzah in the dining halls during Passover, because each of those efforts would be advancing diversity, equity, and/or inclusion?” Ryan wrote. “Regardless, the Governor’s theatrics created a false impression in the public that the Board had resolved do something radical and sweeping as opposed to something tempered.”

Ryan acknowledged the university, at the time of his resignation, had not yet responded to DOJ letters asking for an update on the schools’ DEI practices.

He said the DOJ continually broadened its inquiry and, “I was told we should take the extensions and wait to submit a comprehensive response. Which meant that, by the time I resigned, we had yet to respond to the DOJ’s inquiries, despite receiving seven letters and despite having assembled hundreds of pages of responsive information.”

Ryan concluded his letter to the Faculty Senate saying, “We were committed to following the actual law. We were also open to changing policies and practices if they were not working well or if there were persuasive, principled reasons to change course. At the same time, I was never going to give up the core values of UVA or my own principles simply to satisfy the prevailing political winds or the political ambitions of some. In the end, that may have been the real problem.”