I didn’t appreciate the University of Virginia enough during my four years there as an undergraduate majoring in history and minoring in, as I recall, beer.

Upon leaving Charlottesville, I had a keen appreciation for both the university’s beauty and its founder, Thomas Jefferson. But I figured that part of my life was done and that my future connection would consist solely of rooting for its (usually lackluster) athletic teams.

I was mistaken; the Donald Trump era has brought me closer than ever to the place — at least in my heart.

Eight years ago, during the first summer of Trump’s first term, I watched footage of an event I might have once thought was impossible taking place on the grounds of UVA. Scores of young men carrying torches paraded toward the university’s famed lawn, chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

With their Nazism, fire and fury, they profaned a sacred place for anyone who holds dear Jefferson’s vow that UVA would be “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind.”

The scenes of white supremacists that night scarred me, everyone I knew from my school days and much of the rest of the nation.

It still feels to me as though that “Unite the Right” march was a turning point, when the darkest stirrings that have long beset America came to the forefront. In the days that followed, President Trump could not bring himself to convincingly denounce the demonstrators.

Only a few years later, those same sort of guys stormed the U.S. Capitol, this time with the president’s blessing. After pardoning all the Jan. 6 criminals this year, Trump can’t pretend any longer that they’re anything other than his own brownshirts. It stings.

This summer, however, those of us who love UVA learned that even darker things are possible on campus. At least the neo-Nazis didn’t threaten higher education itself.

For reasons nobody appears to understand well, the Trump administration decided UVA had gone overboard in its quest to have a broad and diverse student body. Its minions began plotting to take down the university’s beloved president, Jim Ryan, and turn back the clock on the progress he’d made in this regard.

Caving to the pressure, UVA formally abandoned its diversity and equity programs, but that didn’t matter. Trump’s Department of Justice said the university president had to go, too, and threatened to block all federal funds to the nation’s second-oldest public university if he remained in office.

Ryan opted to step down rather than have Trump’s anti-intellectual army slice and dice programs that form the lifeblood of higher education.

The New York Times called it an “extraordinary wielding of federal power to oust the 58-year-old college president” and said it “showed the unusual lengths the administration would go to pursue President Trump’s political agenda and shift the ideological tilt of academia, which he views as hostile to conservatives.”

Although Ryan may have made the right choice under the circumstances, it was a bleak moment for Jefferson’s university. Nobody wants to bow to an authoritarian regime at a time when courage is so desperately needed in every institution in this land — and so many colleges and universities, in particular, are under assault, including funding for the University of Maine.

I suspect I know what Mr. Jefferson, who was not one to back down, would say if he saw a president attacking his or any university. As he put it in an 1800 letter that complained about religious figures trying to impose their views on the nation: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

So must we all.