How UVA surrendered to Trump

Here’s a story about the Campus Free Speech administration you won’t read at any of the various news organizations Bari Weiss is in charge of these days:

The former president of the University of Virginia, in his most expansive statement since he resigned in June, described in a letter to the faculty on Friday the immense pressure the Justice Department had directed at him and the school in his final days in the position and said that his ouster had been publicly mischaracterized.

In an extraordinary 12-page letter, the former president, James E. Ryan, said the school’s board had been unwilling to take on the Trump administration and had essentially traded his resignation for a deal to spare the school investigations and fines.

The Justice Department has said it never told the school to oust Mr. Ryan. The school’s board, however, has said that the department wanted him to step aside. Mr. Ryan said in the letter that on June 26, a member of the board and two lawyers for the university told him that, following a call with a top Justice Department official, he had four hours to resign, or severe punitive measures would be leveled against the school by the Trump administration.

“The call for my resignation, right until the end, seemed so outlandish as not to be entirely believable,” Mr. Ryan said. “It also felt like a hostage situation, where the kidnapper threatens harm if you do not keep information about the demands confidential. I was repeatedly told to keep this threat confidential and scolded for sharing the information with some close colleagues to help me think through the best path.”

Mr. Ryan added: “I worried that if I went public, U.Va. would lose funding and get attacked by the Trump administration, and I would still end up being fired or forced to resign regardless.”

The letter from Mr. Ryan is likely to inflame tensions in Virginia around the school’s deal with the Trump administration, which was announced last month and has become a major political issue in the state. Democrats have characterized it as an act of capitulation, the school’s board has claimed that it protects academic freedom and conservatives have praised the ouster of Mr. Ryan.

The idea that you can “protect academic freedom”…by allowing the president of the United States to select your president is the kind of thing so preposterous only a certain kind of academic administrator could actually believe it.

Anyway, did you hear the story about the Oberlin sophomore who told a student reporter that it was kind of insulting to call egg noodles and ketchup “spaghetti marinara?”