Former UVA president Jim Ryan’s life looks pretty normal.
There’s an Amazon package on the front porch, three sets of unlaced sneakers near the mat, and a lawnmower buzzing from the back yard. But facts about his departure from Virginia's flagship university are anything but straightforward.
“I haven’t resolved it,” Ryan said. “I’ve stopped thinking about it.”
Ryan maintains he was told his resignation was required by Trump administration officials who otherwise threatened to freeze funding and widen investigations at the university. Others, like Board of Visitors’ former Rector Rachel Sheridan, vice-rector at the time of Ryan’s departure, gave a different narrative.
Since his departure, Ryan, UVA’s ninth president, has been “decompressing and disentangling” himself from UVA. Spending time with friends and family. Writing, reading, running, and traveling to see as many of his daughter’s soccer games as he can.
“And getting used to the idea of being a civilian again, and having control over your schedule,” Ryan said. "That takes a little while. Because it all happened so quickly, getting to closure took a while. It was a while before I stopped paying close attention to what was happening at UVA. In part, it was hard to look away because it was so tumultuous, and so uncertain, and so many people I know and care about were still there. And that took months, honestly, until I woke up and that wasn’t the first thing I thought about.”
After moving out of the UVA president’s house last summer, Ryan was gone most of last fall—the family has a home in Massachusetts, where his wife Katie grew up. Now, he’s occasionally back at UVA meeting with students and colleagues in offices he keeps at the law school and in Shannon Library.
“At first, I thought it would feel totally weird or I would feel uncomfortable and it was exactly the opposite. You know, I mean, UVA is home still,” he said. “Some people at UVA aren’t quite sure what to make of all this. Do they say, ‘I’m sorry?’ Do they say, ‘Congratulations?’ Because it was so weird, the way it ended. You know, I feel totally comfortable being back on Grounds. I think I make some people uncomfortable when I’m around.”
“What do you do about that, if anything?” I asked.
“There’s nothing really to do,” Ryan responded. “Yeah, I just try to be normal, and myself.”
In addition to writing—there’s a forthcoming book on leadership and published essays about getting higher education back on track—Ryan will soon return to the classroom, including a course he’s planning on law and democracy. He continues to believe in the value of diversity, he said.
“Five or six years ago, it was taken for granted that you’d want diversity in any community, especially a university community,” Ryan said. “And I get that I think some of the efforts around diversity or DEI went too far in terms of telling people what to think, but I don’t think the principles themselves or the concepts themselves should be threatening to anyone.”
Ryan thinks colleges and universities should reconsider some of their structural operations: mandatory on-campus housing, for instance, no roommate picking, and required participation in meal plans.
“I think we should be encouraging students to seek out friendship across lines of difference, and when you’re in a college setting, you have this incredible opportunity to throw people together in all sorts of ways,” Ryan said. “Most of us standing in the grocery line don’t turn to the person next to us and, you know, ask them about late-term abortions. You start by asking people, ‘Where are you from? And what do you like to do?’”
If UVA has slipped a bit from Ryan’s focus, the state of higher education—beset with declining enrollments, high price tags, mergers and college closures—worries him. Chosen to deliver UVA’s graduation speech last month, Ryan—who joked about being an “honorary member of the 2026,” given his ouster—offered a message to thousands gathered in John Paul Jones Arena: “Do the right thing,” Ryan told graduates. “Always.”
“I grew up Catholic, so I know a lot about sin,” Ryan said, crossing his legs in the wooden UVA chair in his home office. “Learning about the sin of omission is still surprising to me, that you could sin by not doing something. The reason it’s fascinating to me is that I’ve come to believe that you regret most are the things that you don’t do, as opposed to things that you do.”
“Should I have done something different? It’s hard to say,” he continued. “I’ve turned all those things over in my mind a million times, and, if faced with the same circumstances, I would still make the same choice, even though it was a difficult one. It’s still too early to tell how this is all going to play out. But you can’t know what would’ve happened if you had gone down the other path."
Ryan still earns 75% of his president’s salary, about $715,000 annually, and remains on sabbatical. UVA’s 10th president, Scott Beardsley, will be officially inaugurated at a ceremony this coming fall. By then, Ryan expects to have his Irish passport in hand—his late birth mother was born there, so he is automatically a citizen—and he plans to help his four children apply for dual citizenship, too.
However, he says he’s not going anywhere.
