Former President Thomas Jefferson, President Donald Trump, and former President James Madison. Photo by Stock Montage/Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky
July 3, 2025
Last Friday, I received a message from Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia. At first, I thought it was like countless others I have received over the years, since I defended my PhD dissertation on resistance and collaboration in Vichy France at UVA in 1989 — just a news dispatch from my alma mater.
It wasn’t. “With a very heavy heart,” Ryan wrote, “I have submitted my resignation as President of the University of Virginia.” Ryan had faced pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to step down for failing to purge DEI programs at the university, and continuing to factor race and ethnicity in scholarship decisions and programs. Finally, and with deep regret, he had decided to give in.
As a historian of Vichy France, the news did not shock me. Because what happened at my alma mater resembles what happened 85 years ago in the state institutions, including those of higher education, of the once-proud French republic.
When the armies of Nazi Germany defeated their country within a matter of weeks, dividing it into occupied and unoccupied zones, the country’s last elected representatives handed over full powers to a national hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who presided over the collaborationist government known as Vichy thanks to the spa town where it settled.
Among the first official acts taken by Vichy was the promulgation of a battery of antisemitic laws known as the statut des Juifs. “In all fields and especially in the public service,” declared the preamble to these laws, “the influence of Jews has made itself felt, insinuating and finally decomposing. All observers agree in noting the baneful effects of their activity over recent years, during which they had a preponderant part in the direction of our affairs. These facts command the action of the government to which has fallen the pathetic task of French restoration.”
Not only were thousands of naturalized French Jews stripped of their citizenship, but native-born French Jews were forbidden to practice in several professions, including the military, medicine and the media. And French Jews were removed from their positions in the civil service, which included the nation’s secondary and high schools, as well as universities. More than 100 Jewish academics were shown the door by administrators all too willing to accommodate their institutions of higher learning to the authoritarian rule of Vichy.
Why was the Vichy regime so eager to adopt the Nazi attitude toward the Jews? Robert Paxton, the dean of Vichy historians, argues that the cultural and political wars fought in France during the 1930s primed the path for Vichy. On the French right, there was a growing fear not of the enemy from without — German totalitarianism — but rather of the enemy from within: cultural and ethnic minorities.
More so than fascism or totalitarianism, French conservatives saw these groups as unassimilable and unfamiliar, and the greatest menace to the nation. To them, their nation’s loss in the battle against Germany was less a tragedy to be mourned than an opportunity to be grasped.
Nearly a century later, last week’s events at the University of Virginia reflect all too ominously similar a progression. American conservatives have spent recent decades cultivating a profound internal fear of groups perceived as “other” — hence Trump’s attacks on diversity initiatives at public universities, and Ryan’s forced departure.
Though place, time, and the ethnic groups conservatives view as threatening are different, it seems everything and nothing has changed. And the fact that this occurred at UVA makes the current moment even more tragic.
This year happens to mark the bicentennial of the birth of UVA founder Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village,” the name that Jefferson gave to his creation. His vision for his academical village differed wildly from that of other private and state universities.
UVA had neither a professor of divinity, ties to a church, nor compulsory Sunday services, all of which were the rule at other universities. Finally (and crucially), professors were free to choose the texts and subjects of their lectures.
This village, in short, was guarded by the highest and sturdiest of walls between state and church, guaranteeing, in Jefferson’s words, its pursuit of truth, regardless of where it led, and toleration of any error “so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
In a letter to a friend, Jefferson explained why he decided to found his academical village on these principles:
Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights … yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operation, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts that they may be able to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.
Among “the people at large,” Jefferson placed all religious minorities. In his campaign to naturalize Jews, Catholics, and other religious sects, he cited John Locke’s claim that “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.”
Though Jefferson had qualms over certain aspects of the Jewish faith, he never wavered in his conviction that Jewish colonists deserved citizenship no less than did the descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims.
This is why Jewish Americans should view last week’s event in Charlottesville with concern similar to that provoked by the neo-Nazi march there in 2017. For the first time since Donald Trump launched his assault on our institutions of higher learning, he did not just demand that a university’s curriculum conform to his administration’s ideology — already an outrageous proposition — but he also demanded the head of its president.
And while it’s true that Ryan chose to resign, it could equally be said that his head was dutifully delivered on a gold-encrusted platter by the Board of Visitors, the university’s governing board, when it voted unanimously to dissolve its DEI requirements and refused to rally to Ryan’s side last week.
One wonders what one original member of the Board of Visitors, James Madison, might have made of the episode — keeping in mind his famous warning that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
I think he and Jefferson might conclude that the current Board of Visitors has surrendered the arms of knowledge to a government which prefers ignorance. Shortly before his death, Jefferson was burdened by pessimism over the future of our country, regretting that the sacrifice made by his generation was “to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”
Thomas Jefferson believed independence was worth a revolution, even if he feared those who followed him wouldn’t preserve it. Now his prediction is proving true — as UVA’s leaders appear to take their cues not from their founder and his peers, but rather from the the bigots of our own authoritarian and xenophobic government, determined to follow the same path as Vichy.
