First were the Ivy League schools — Columbia University, Harvard University and Brown University. Then came the state of Virginia — the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Virginia Military Institute.
In an effort to eradicate DEI from college campuses across the country, the Trump administration made Virginia’s colleges an early focal point. President Donald Trump says colleges are engaging in illegal racial discrimination under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and his administration has opened investigations, put pressure on college presidents and levied fines from schools.
Political experts say the role of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, personal links between the colleges and the Trump administration and the state’s recent history voting Democratic all factored into why Virginia’s colleges came under the microscope before others.
Now, what happened in Virginia is playing out in other parts of the country. On Wednesday, the president of the University of California said the state’s system of universities was negotiating with the Trump administration in regard to allegations that the University of California, Los Angeles fostered an environment of antisemitism. The Justice Department is also investigating whether any campuses in the California system violated civil rights laws.
“The Trump administration chose to use us as a test tube for what they’re planning in California,” said Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax.
The latest move came Thursday, when U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her department would direct colleges to submit data of the race of applicants and admitted students in an effort to determine whether colleges discriminate in the admission process.
In Virginia, Republicans started putting their attention on colleges months ago. At VMI, the board of visitors voted in February not to renew the contract of Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, who was the university’s first Black superintendent in its 186-year history. Wins took the job in 2020, shortly after Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III resigned after then-Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, called for an investigation into how the school treated Black cadets.
Though the Trump administration did not directly target VMI, what took place there was an effort to unwind Northam’s work.
Then, UVA president Jim Ryan resigned in June under pressure from the Department of Justice, whose officials accused him of responding too slowly to a mandate that universities strike all forms of DEI from their campuses. George Mason followed. The university in Fairfax County is under numerous investigations from the Departments of Justice and Education amid allegations that the administrators used illegal racial preferences in hiring faculty and created an antisemitic environment since the start of the war in Gaza.
Some Virginia colleges have avoided such probes. In an effort to follow Trump’s directive, Virginia Commonwealth University dissolved its Office of Inclusive Excellence, eliminated at least 13 jobs and hired a consultant to check its work.
Youngkin’s role
One reason the Trump administration is targeting Virginia schools, Surovell said, is because federal officials have the assistance of Virginia’s governor.
“I don’t think there’s any question Governor Youngkin and the attorney general have been coordinating with the Trump administration,” Surovell said.
Spokespeople for Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares did not respond to requests for comment. Surovell points to moves Youngkin and Miyares made just after they took office in January 2022.
The first executive order Youngkin issued was titled “Ending the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory” in Virginia’s K-12 schools. The administration said the measure was meant to eliminate teaching that instructs students to view life only through the lens of race and presumes some students are unconsciously racist and others are victims. The order claimed students are being politically indoctrinated, a phrase Trump has repeated.
Days later, Youngkin signed another order renaming the position of the state’s DEI director to the chief Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion officer. In April 2023 that official, Martin Brown, declared at VMI that “DEI is dead.”
Another role the Youngkin administration played came early in Youngkin’s term. About a week after Miyares took office, the attorney general fired the top lawyers for UVA, Tim Heaphy, and George Mason, Brian Walther. Miyares replaced them with conservatives, effectively limiting the autonomy of Ryan, then UVA’s president, and George Mason President Gregory Washington.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Youngkin, in an effort to position himself for the 2028 presidential election, sought ways to connect himself to the Trump base. Although there’s little Youngkin can do to advance immigration issues in Virginia, he said, DEI in higher education is a change Youngkin can implement.
“This is a good way to do it,” Sabato said. “It connects to some of the issues he ran on in 2021.”
Youngkin also gets to appoint members to each school’s board of visitors, which govern the colleges. As of July, Youngkin essentially had nominated or renominated every board member in the state.
On June 9, a Senate committee voted not to confirm Youngkin’s nomination of eight board members to UVA, George Mason and VMI, but Youngkin insisted the members take their seats. Surovell filed a lawsuit in Fairfax County to block the disputed board members from assuming their roles, and a judge sided with the Democrats. Miyares said he will appeal.
Personal connections
Personal connections between the universities and the Trump administration also likely played a role. Harmeet K. Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, and Gregory W. Brown, her deputy, pushed for Ryan’s resignation at UVA. Dhillon and Brown are UVA graduates.
Ryan also faced steady criticism from a conservative group of alumni called the Jefferson Council. In May, they purchased a full-page ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch calling for his firing, saying Ryan ignored a scandal in the health system that led to the CEO’s resignation and mishandled the investigation into the November 2022 shooting that left three UVA football players dead. They also accused Ryan of instituting a political agenda under the guise of DEI that undermined the free exchange of ideas.
Another personal connection is Lindsey Burke, whom Youngkin appointed to the George Mason board of visitors in 2022. Burke, an author of Project 2025 – a conservative guiding document the Heritage Foundation published in 2023 ahead of Trump’s election – left the board earlier this year to join the U.S. Department of Education as deputy chief of staff.
In addition to being across the river from Washington, George Mason is also near Loudoun County, which in 2021 became ground zero for education reform centering on Critical Race Theory. The university is also known for having a Republican-leaning law school named for famed conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Blue states
The fact that Virginia voted against Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 likely also played a role, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. Trump has made an effort to clean up liberal states.
“It’s not an accident he’s going after blue states,” Tobias said, noting that public colleges in states such as Minnesota or Illinois are worrying they’re next.
Since the Departments of Justice and Education opened investigations at Virginia colleges, they have turned their focus to the University of California, which operates its public colleges in a unified system, to investigate claims of racial discrimination and antisemitism. Other schools are being investigated, too.
Last month, the Education Department said it was seeking to discover whether five universities illegally awarded scholarships only to undocumented immigrants or those who stayed in the United States under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
Another reason Virginia’s colleges are under scrutiny: they’re highly regarded and a good place to champion a cause. Surovell called Virginia’s 15 public colleges “the envy of nearly every state across America.”