University Of Virginia Officially Canceled DEI, But Has A Long Road To Actually Eradicate It
The University of Virginia (UVA) Board of Visitors may have voted to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on Friday, but the school still has a long way to go before that’s reality.
On Friday, the university’s board of visitors voted to adopt a plan to remove all DEI programming at the school, including in “admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.”
In doing so, UVA became one of the first public schools in the country to preemptively comply with the Trump administration’s orders and guidance on eradicating DEI. The board’s resolution requires university President Jim Ryan to report back in 30 days on efforts to comply after he spent his entire tenure as president building the infrastructure.
The move was made to comply with the U.S. Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, it was also done against the backdrop of Columbia University losing $400 million in federal funding in a move showing the Trump administration’s resolve to follow through on its threat to revoke federal funding if universities do not follow federal civil rights law and directives to stop race and sex discrimination in the name of DEI.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., said the board’s decision is “a huge step toward restoring the ideas and pillars of Thomas Jefferson and the university that he founded, that everyone is created equal, that we will not have illegal discrimination, that we will restore merit-based opportunity.” It is because of Youngkin that UVA has a majority of Republican appointees sitting on its board.
Youngkin added that “DEI is done at UVA,” and said he expects that other universities in Virginia will follow suit. However, because DEI is an ideology that operates by embedding itself into every aspect of operation, and its foot soldiers are skilled at rebranding it away from public view, directives from the board alone will not be enough.
“The Board of Visitors’ proclamation must be followed by definitive action removing all DEI personnel from the payrolls,” Thomas M. Neale, president emeritus of the Jefferson Council, an alumni group that has been working to restore meritocracy at UVA for years, told The Federalist. “Otherwise they will be reallocated to other departments under different titles, pursuing the same goals. Return Mr. Jefferson’s University to a meritocracy that embodies equality for all.”
Neale added a quote from Jefferson, stating, “Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation for a due degree of liberty.”
James Bacon, contributing editor of the Jefferson Council, is concerned about having pro-DEI staff carry out the end of DEI at UVA, writing, “Responsibility for carrying out the resolutions will fall upon leaders who constructed or maintained the DEI systems in the first place. They will have plenty of support from staff, faculty, students, sympathetic media, and Democratic legislators.”
DEI has been a massive pursuit at UVA since 2020, with its Racial Equity Task Force asking for nearly $1 billion in racial equity programming. The following year, the school had the second-largest number of DEI staff of any major university (94), and by 2024, had increased that to 235 and spending $20 million on salaries alone.
At the February meeting of the UVA Faculty Senate Executive Council, DEI committee chairman Eric Ramirez-Weaver said they were looking at “workarounds” to keep racial preferences and DEI at the school, suggesting staff resistance to the plan.
Bacon said that other universities in Virginia, like George Mason University (GMU) in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, are already looking at ways to bypass complying with President Donald Trump’s order ending DEI by editing web pages to be less outwardly racialized and rebranding some offices.
In an email to the university, President Gregory Washington said GMU’s Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion would be renamed the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community. He said the change, “simply affirms our actual compliance through more precise naming.” Language on websites will be reviewed for “compliance” as well.
It has been well-documented that schools will try to keep their DEI operations alive under the guise of new offices, or simply embedding DEI employees into other administrative departments.
The UVA resolution appears to have anticipated some attempts to bypass compliance or hide a fully operational DEI structure, writing that the school will “ensure there are no efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends” as well as “ensure there are no third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race.”
Those provisions were informed by federal guidance in a Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education as well as a Frequently Asked Questions page about that guidance. But they do not explicitly take on academia’s bottom-feeder mentality that fosters exact same sort of rebranding being pursued at GMU.
“Universities are incubators of woke bafflegab; academics are constantly giving words new meaning,” Bacon wrote. “UVA can expunge ‘diversity,’ ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ from its official vocabulary, but there’s nothing to stop the institution from cloaking its underlying philosophy, predicated upon the conviction that America is systemically racist, sexist, and homophobic, by employing different words with similar meaning.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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