University of Virginia agrees to Trump administration demands over admissions and hiring

The University of Virginia (UVA) has become the latest institution to agree to the Trump administration’s demands concerning discrimination in admissions and hiring following significant pressure from the justice department.

The deal, which the department announced on Wednesday, comes after the president of the esteemed public university resigned in June to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

If the president, Jim Ryan, had stayed in the job, he was told “hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”, according to Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia.

The deal means the justice department will end its investigation into the school, while the school agreed “not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in its university programming, admissions, hiring or other activities. UVA will provide relevant information and data to the Department of Justice on a quarterly basis through 2028,” the announcement states.

The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Brown had already reached agreements with the Trump administration to have federal funding, which had been cut, restored in exchange for settlements concerning claims of alleged antisemitism. They also agreed to demands such as adopting the administration’s definitions of male and female.

Trump has said he also reached an agreement with Harvard, but that does not appear to have been finalized.

The University of Virginia is the first public school to reach such a deal.

Alex Day, a 2023 UVA graduate and “proud Hoo”, does not think the school has settled and said that schools should “come together, rather than allowing themselves to be backed into these corners individually”.

“A lot of eyes are on UVA right now,” said Day, who studied foreign affairs and public policy and is now in law school. “It undermines the next university’s ability to make a free, fair decision for their students if the administration can put pressure on one university at a time.”