Latest news with #UniversityOfVirginia
Washington Post
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Why attack colleges? To open students' minds or blow up institutions?
When President Donald Trump and the foot soldiers of his populist brigade went after Harvard and Columbia, they were right on message: In a rigidly divided country, Trump delights in dramatic actions against the symbols and institutions of the nation's elites. When the Trump assault targeted the University of Virginia, the message got a bit muddy: Sure, most American colleges are hotbeds of conformist liberals eager to impose their righteousness on the rest of us. But U-Va. is also something of a throwback, a school that still celebrates its intellectual inspiration, Thomas Jefferson; stands up for rigor; and attracts students from a wide array of political backgrounds. Going after U-Va. seemed like a decision to spray the MAGA movement's ammo randomly rather than target the core engines of higher education's woke machine.
Telegraph
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
University president resigned after Jewish student ‘threatened with gun'
The University of Virginia's president resigned after a Jewish student was allegedly threatened with a gun, it has emerged. James Ryan stepped down from the 200-year-old institution last month when Donald Trump's administration demanded his resignation, threatening to strip it of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. The justice department opened an investigation into the university earlier this year, which according to NBC News focused on the alleged threat made against the Jewish student. 'The facts surrounding this specific controversy and of the [university's] alleged deliberate indifference and retaliatory treatment of the victim in response are, in a word, disturbing,' Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general, said in May. Conservative critics have claimed Prof Ryan pushed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in defiance of federal edicts, prompting anger from the administration. According to court documents reviewed by NBC, Robert Romer, a housemate of the Jewish student, who has not been named, allegedly posted anti-Semitic memes in a group chat for residents. In October, he is said to have written to other housemates: 'I am going to attempt to free Palestine. Anyone is welcome to join in on the beating,' which the Jewish student interpreted as a threat. 'Incredibly scary' Later that month, the student claimed he found Mr Romer holding a gun in his room. The student is said to have touched it to find out if it was real and that Mr Romer refused to say whether it was loaded. 'I'm very scared at this point… Especially because someone had sent messages that I interpreted as anti-Semitic' he alleged later in court. 'I interpreted as pointed towards me, had previously threatened to fight me, didn't apologise for it, and then was waiting for me in my room holding a gun at midnight — that was something that was incredibly scary.' After reporting the incident to the university and police, he testified that he moved out of the house and arranged to study abroad for the spring term because he was scared. Mr Romer was arrested on Nov 1 and charged with four offences, including hate crime assault, although two – brandishing a weapon and entering a property to cause damage – were later dropped. Housemates testified in court that the gun had been unloaded and the Jewish student briefly held it. Jewish rights groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs, wrote to the university in April warning the university was not 'immune' to the anti-Semitism sweeping college campuses in a letter seen by The Telegraph. 'Lest there be any temptation to sweep this under the rug… This is not a case of 'kids being kids'; nor can these actions be brushed aside as poor judgment or as mere jesting,' they said. 'The acts directed against this Jewish student were wholly unacceptable anywhere in civil society, were exacerbated by their occurrence in the unique setting of shared housing at a university, and were undeniably rooted in anti-Semitism.' They added: 'The fact that the Jewish student was fortunate to avoid physical harm does not diminish the severity of the threats; rather, it highlights the urgency of serious and substantive university intervention.' 'Allegations entirely false' Graven Craig, a lawyer representing Mr Romer, said the allegations against his client were 'entirely false' and denied he had pointed a gun at the student. The messages from the group chat were 'cherry-picked' and were typical of 'college-aged males from diverse backgrounds who all enjoyed poking fun at each other', he told NBC. Tom Romer, Mr Romer's father, said his son was innocent and that 'there was no hate, no assault and no brandishing'. Another housemate, who allegedly owned the gun, complained to the university in December that the Jewish student had harassed him and used ethnic slurs. The student denied the claim and Virginia later dropped an investigation into the matter. The University of Virginia said in a statement: 'This matter is subject to ongoing criminal proceedings and federal privacy laws prevent us from commenting on specific student records. 'The university opposes anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, and we take swift action to support students who experience threats or harassment and to hold offenders accountable.'
Wall Street Journal
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Toxic Lack of Masculinity
Maybe this marriage thing is going to catch on, and having children will become popular again after our era of historically low birthrates. This column noted last year: One of the cheerful champions is the University of Virginia's Brad Wilcox, who seems to have found some compelling new evidence for the thesis that cultural elites are willing to listen. After reading a recent edition of the New York Times, he posts on X:
Washington Post
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Trump wins the ritual sacrifice of U-Va.'s president. So now what?
When University of Virginia students return to campus this fall, everything will be different. Their school president will be gone, sacrificed on the altar of the MAGA movement's campaign against the bogeyman of diversity, equity and inclusion. The school's DEI programs will be history. The selection process for the next president will be underway, as Trumpian forces transform one of America's premier universities into a place where students are no longer inculcated with identity politics, no longer infected with anti-Americanism, no longer submersed in leftist values.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind
Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia's president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job. The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump's orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion. UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump's lackeys claim the university didn't go far enough in rooting out DEI. This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It's unlikely to be the last. On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus. On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women's teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas's records. Let's be clear: DEI, antisemitism and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They're excuses to give the Trump regime power over America's colleges and universities. Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power? They're following Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's playbook for creating an 'illiberal democracy' – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this: First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check. Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don't bend to your wishes, you'll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check. Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process. Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check. Then go after the universities. Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel's bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired. It's good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally. But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism. JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors 'the enemy' and suggested using Orbán's method for ending 'leftwing domination' of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS's Face the Nation on 19 May 2024: Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They're not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year. I'm not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he's made some smart decisions there that we could learn from. His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they're much more open to conservative ideas.' Yet what, exactly, constitutes a 'conservative idea?' That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency? The claim that higher education must be more open to such 'conservative ideas' is dangerous drivel. So what's the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime's attack on education? Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump's education department announced on Tuesday it's withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department. Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. That's why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities. In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind. Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at
