The Justice Department’s Oct. 22 deal with the University of Virginia — which temporarily pauses five federal investigations into the university in exchange for UVA adhering to the Trump administration’s stricter interpretation of race-based admissions, among other concessions — has ignited fierce backlash across the university and in the state’s Capitol. Critics warn that the agreement hands sweeping control to the Trump administration and undermines hard-won protections for students and faculty of color.
To understand what the agreement really means, Charlottesville Tomorrow spoke with legal experts and faculty who caution that its reach extends far beyond UVA — setting a precedent that could reshape how public universities nationwide interpret civil rights law and respond to federal pressure.
UVA is the first public university to sign a deal with the Trump administration
“We had five open investigations…and the DOJ is pausing those investigations,” Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Brie Gertler said during a Faculty Senate meeting on Oct. 24. “They have agreed to do that, and we have agreed to continue doing what we have been doing, which is to continue reviewing our policies and practices to ensure that they are in line with civil rights law.”
This guidance is largely the same as UVA’s existing internal guidance developed and distributed by senior leadership and university counsel in May — a month before former President Jim Ryan’s ouster from his position at UVA — Gertler said during the meeting.
The one exception, she specified, is that the DOJ’s guidance states that the sexes must be defined by biological sex, that people of a biological sex must have access to intimate spaces that are restricted to people of their biological sex and that athletic competitions must be defined by biological sex.
“The agreement that we signed says that we will follow the July 29 guidance subject to relevant judicial decisions,” Gertler added. “And there are two relevant judicial decisions here from the Fourth Circuit, which say that, in fact, Title IX requires that people are able to access intimate spaces that correspond to their gender identity and to participate in athletic competitions corresponding to their gender identity.”
The deal with the DOJ announced Wednesday marks the first time a public university has signed such an agreement with the Trump administration, according to reporting from The New York Times (subscription required). It comes after months of pressure on UVA and other universities to fall in line with the administration’s political agenda — in particular its rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion.
UVA is the fourth university to reach such an arrangement. Similar deals have been made with Brown University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, while Harvard remains in negotiations.
The deal was announced only a few days after the university rejected the Trump administration’s Compact for Excellence in Higher Education on Friday, Oct. 17. The rejection came just hours after more than a thousand people — including students, faculty, staff, alumni and members of the Charlottesville community — rallied on UVA’s lawn to demand that university leadership turn down the offer. The compact urged universities to agree to a list of requests in exchange for priority access to federal research funds. It would have created sweeping changes to universities’ hiring and admissions practices, foreign student enrollment and culture so that they aligned with President Trump’s political agenda.
“I think everyone was stunned that we had just gone through this whole compact process where we had a protest and the Faculty Senate issued a resolution against it, and then all of a sudden just a few days later, Mahoney, through secret negotiations, basically signed a deal with the devil,” Walt Heinecke, UVA professor and immediate past president of the university’s chapter of the American Association for University Professors (AAUP-UVA), told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
UVA defends deal, critics call it federal overreach
UVA’s administration has praised the deal for preserving academic freedom, preventing external monitoring, avoiding fines and pausing expensive investigations.
Interim President Paul Mahoney described the agreement as the “best available path forward” in an Oct. 22 message to the UVA community. Mahoney added that “some work remains to be done to satisfy fully the terms of this agreement,” but he is optimistic that the UVA community “will be able to pursue that work in a manner consistent with the values and principles that are at the heart of everything we do.”
But Virginia State Senator Scott Surovell criticized the deal as “a surrender” that undermines the university’s independence. State Senators L. Louise Lucas and Creigh Deeds also criticized the agreement, as has State Delegate Katrina Callsen. In a recent letter to UVA’s leadership, Callsen and Deeds asked them to reverse the agreement, arguing that it subjects UVA to unprecedented federal control, according to reporting from The Cavalier Daily.
State Sen. and Lieutenant Gov.-elect Ghazala Hashmi, too, criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to interfere in the state’s institutions of higher education during an Oct. 27 visit to UVA, where she listened to concerns that faculty, students and other members of UVA’s community laid out about the deal.
“The federal actions are such and to such a degree of severity that they are posing fundamental threats to our institutions, not the least of which is the threat to full funding,” she said, further criticizing the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion at UVA and beyond.
The University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-UVA) also opposed the agreement. The faculty organization — which aims to defend academic freedom, shared governance and professional standards in higher education — first sent a letter to the university’s Board of Visitors back in August expressing concern about the university’s ongoing negotiations with the DOJ and warning against allowing outside authorities to infringe on university autonomy.
One of its main critiques of the agreement is that Interim President Mahoney acted unilaterally to sign the deal with no warning, transparency or opportunity for the university’s constituency to voice their opinions or oppose its signing.
“There was absolutely no faculty consultation on signing this agreement,” Heinecke said. “And the faculty senate leadership was cut out of this, so that agreement that he signed has no legitimacy with the faculty.”
UVA professor Lisa Peterson, a current member of the university’s Faculty Senate, expressed similar sentiments during the Oct. 24 senate meeting.
“I just I think it’s disingenuous at best or duplicitous at worst, that we saw interim president Mahoney on Friday afternoon and he said some things to us, and then in less than a week, he unilaterally went and signed an agreement on behalf of the entire university after having been interim president for not even three full months, with limited trust,” she said. “It concerns me that he has so little respect for what he must know our position to be.”
Former Chief Deputy Attorney General of Virginia Claire Gastañaga agreed that it was hard to fathom that an interim president would sign a years-long deal unilaterally on behalf of the university’s constituents and future leadership. During her eight years in the Attorney General’s Office, Gastañaga was responsible for giving legal advice to universities and colleges in the state.
“I think it’s remarkable that Mahoney, as an interim appointee — unless he’s been given some signal that he’s going to be the permanent president — would sign something that commits the president personally to guarantee quarterly reports for a period that could extend well beyond his presidency, until 2028,” she said.
At the same time, she said, Mahoney’s own appointment remains arguably legally murky given that he was selected by a Board of Visitors that does not currently meet official membership guidelines required by Virginia law and is therefore not a legally constituted body.
“The reality is that one has to ask the question of whether an interim president picked by a board that isn’t legally constituted should feel that they have the authority to sign a multi-year agreement in a situation like this,” Gastañaga added.