After submitting a six-section Freedom of Information Act Request to the University Sept. 18, State Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, received 284 pages of records Oct. 29, pertaining to former University President Jim Ryan’s resignation this summer.
Among these documents were several public records, including community announcements surrounding Ryan’s resignation and letters from the Justice Department. They also included previously unreleased records such as text messages and emails between Board of Visitors members and Ryan’s internal letter of resignation sent to then-Rector Robert Hardie.
Deeds provided these documents to The Cavalier Daily, which has submitted 25 FOIA requests of its own but has not received any records since July 1. Below is a summary of the new information regarding Ryan’s resignation that The Cavalier Daily found after reviewing all 284 pages of the records.
The full records can be viewed here.
Ryan’s internal resignation letter
Ryan resigned June 26, via an email sent to Hardie and carbon copied to current Rector Rachel Sheridan. Although he publicly released an announcement of his resignation to the University community June 27, the University previously declined to release the private email to The Cavalier Daily, citing an exemption for “presidential correspondence.” Ryan told the community that he had planned to step down at the end of the next academic year before challenges regarding the Justice Department began, and the internal letter added that he believed this would lead to a calmer transition.
“I also believed, and continue to do so, that this would allow for an orderly transition to the next administration, avoid the disruption that comes from a fairly sudden departure and would be in keeping with traditional practices of universities, including ours,” Ryan wrote.
Board negotiations with the Justice Department
The records also reveal tense discussions over text between Hardie and Sheridan in the time before and after Ryan’s resignation.
Hardie began the conversation in a text chain to Sheridan and Board Member Paul Manning June 24 — three days before Ryan resigned — saying he was “disappointed” in the pair for leaving him out of an alleged conversation with the Justice Department.
“Both of you will be vilified as well as the Board (I will no longer be on it so will have maximum power to oppose it). I will oppose it with all my might, which is significant,” Hardie wrote. “I am very disappointed that two of my closest friends decided to leave their friend the Rector out of such a conservation. Stand by your president. This is sickening to me. I am appalled.”
After June 25, no texts in the chain were exchanged for another month, until Hardie wrote July 27 that Sheridan and Manning had left him out of discussions with the Justice Department in June, which he said the pair had at Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s suggestion.
“I was the rector of our Board and I didn’t find out until the clock on the bomb was ticking,” Hardie wrote. “If I had known before, I would have enjoined [Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine] and others and perhaps we could have avoided the shitshow that U.Va. now encounters.”
Sheridan and Manning both disputed Hardie’s account. Sheridan said that only three conversations between Board members and the Justice Department occurred before Ryan’s resignation — an in-person meeting between Justice Department officials, Sheridan and now-Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson June 3, a “brief call” between the Justice Department, Sheridan and Manning June 24 and a final communication June 26 just after Ryan told Sheridan that he would resign. She also said that all three meetings were held with Ryan’s full knowledge and at his request.
“Paul [Manning] and I have acted selflessly, with integrity and solely in the best interests of U.Va.,” Sheridan wrote.
In a Faculty Senate meeting July 11, a senator claimed that Sheridan was “negotiating” with the Justice Department on behalf of the Board in June. At the time, Sheridan denied having negotiated with the Justice Department.
Sheridan also said that a June 26 article published by the New York Times, which reported that Ryan was being pressured to resign and was published just hours before Ryan sent the internal letter, only upset the Justice Department and expedited his resignation.
“The circus began when the [New York Times] ran its article, and the [Justice Department] got upset with that obvious leaking. That led to the pressure and the expedited resignation,” Sheridan wrote.
Ryan’s community announcement
Within the documents are also several drafts of Ryan’s resignation statement to the community. As Ryan prepared to release this to students, faculty and staff, it went through several rounds of approval by University Communications, Sheridan and Hardie. An initial version of the message mentioned the Justice Department’s role in his resignation and voiced concerns about the Board’s independence.
“The Department of Justice had threatened to cause hundreds of millions of federal dollars that flow to the University to be frozen or taken away altogether, unless I was no longer president,” Ryan initially wrote. “Our Board did not believe we could or should fight against this threat because we would not win, which is not an unreasonable belief.”
The final draft which was sent to the community did not include these statements, although it is unclear why these changes were made — responses to Ryan’s email from Sheridan and Hardie said that the two would call him about possible changes and later gave final approval.
Presidential search committee
Insight into the current presidential search committee comes within later documents. One text conversation between former Rector Rusty Conner and Sheridan includes advice from Conner, who was rector when Ryan was hired, on how to conduct the upcoming search. Conner urged Sheridan and the Board to respond to the “reasonable” expectations of faculty and students and maintain strict confidentiality with regards to the search.
“Search Committee Composition: There is always the struggle between efficiency and inclusiveness. We opted for inclusiveness so that everyone would be invested in the selection and would not be inclined to reject the selection simply because they were not part of the process,” Conner wrote.
The University has claimed that the current presidential search committee is the most representative in the University’s history, and that it includes more students than the committee which selected Ryan. However, it only includes one current undergraduate student — Gregory Perryman, the student representative to the Board — and two graduate students, a factor which led Student Council to pass a vote of no confidence in the Board this summer.
In response to this vote, a University spokesperson told The Cavalier Daily that Class of ‘25 alumna Gretchen Walsh and Kenyon Bonner, vice president and chief student affairs officer, also qualified as student representatives. In one of the FOIA records regarding the committee, Dave Martel, vice president for communications and chief marketing officer, said that Perryman was the only student.
Sheridan also sent a statement about Board representation in the committee to the full Board July 25, noting that there were 10 current members on the presidential search, although she did not include the student and faculty representatives to the Board as part of that number. There are now eight members of the Board — not including the representatives — following the State Senate’s rejections of five Youngkin appointees to the Board in late August.
“The entire BOV, of course, is charged with making the ultimate selection,” Sheridan wrote. “Therefore, even those BOV members not on the committee will have input and responsibility for making this important decision. As you know, we will also be launching searches to fill several other important vacancies, and we will need to divide and conquer in order to populate all those search committees.”
The documents include that first round interviews for the next president of the University were set to take place in Washington, D.C., the week of Nov. 17. It is unclear from the documents whether this schedule remains accurate, but Gov.-elect Spanberger asked the Board Wednesday to delay the presidential search — a request the University has not yet responded to.
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