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Brief description of what's happening: a bit over 2 years ago, Teressa Sullivan was appointed the first woman president in the history of UVa, a school that was all male until the 70's.
Suddenly, last week she was forced to resign because of a "philosophical difference" with the Board of Visitors, a group that is appointed by the state of oversee University Affairs and top level hirings. It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change to the future plans of the University, not incremental change.
The students and faculty are outraged because this was done in secret behind closed doors, which is very much contrary to the way things are typically done at UVa (because of Jefferson's vision or whatever, I find a lot of the Jefferson talk to be crap but let's take it for what it is for now).
There have been protests, yada yada yada everybody is pissed and people are starting to quit.
This is a big damn deal that's only getting worse, and although I'm a UVa alum who for some reason doesn't really care, I suggest taking a look at this if you're interested in the bs that can go on at the ivory tower institutions
A fundamental problem is that university boards have an increasing disconnect from anything to do with merit, and a close enough connect to donating money (in two ways) that it's pretty close to just buying a seat. They're mostly made up some mixture of: 1) large donors to the university, who're appointed to maintain good relations, encourage future donations, etc.; and 2) for public universities, large political donors, who're appointed by governors, sort of in the way that ambassadorships often go to big political donors.
It's admittedly long been common for particularly large donors to be flattered a bit with some role, but over the past 10-20 years this seems to have gone from being a few members of the board, to being almost all of them, with very few members appointed primarily because of non-donation-related merit, like someone thinking they're actually good candidates for overseeing an academic/research institution. Note the lack of accomplished scientists on the board, for example. In addition, the political appointees seem to have decreased in quality: it was once more common to appoint someone who, while they were from your own party, was a late-career "elder statesman" type figure, e.g. a former governor or Congressman.
It's sadly not a partisan issue, either: if you look at, say, the University of California Board of Regents, you have a nice bipartisan mixture of big Democratic donors (appointed by Democratic governors) and big Republican donors (appointed by Republican governors). Their expertise is... not too relevant seeming, including such credentials as "former CEO of Paramount Pictures" and "husband of Dianne Feinstein".
I'll add that by all accounts she was beloved and was doing what was widely considered a great job. NOBODY was openly complaining, it was very sudden.
It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a
bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change
to the future plans of the University, not incremental
change.
Sounds like an american version of the novel Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue
Additional backstory: the revolt of the faculty is due to the Board wanting to close marginal academic departments at the University.
Further backstory: the expenditures of the academic division at UVA have increased about 80% since 2001. Enrollment has only increased 9%. In-state tuition has increased about 275%.
I'm not a UVA alum, but I grew up in Virginia, so I care about what happens at UVA. UVA's faculty can wax philosophical all they want about academic freedom and the like, but at the end of the day the explosion in university expenses cannot be ignored. Expenditures on faculty salaries have risen 4-5% per year over the last decade even though enrollment has only grown 0.7% per year and salaries in other sectors have been stagnant.
It's insane that there are 3,300 faculty for a school that has only 21,000 FTE students. I'm a strong supporter of public education and public research, but facilitating this faculty growth at the expense of students is absolutely ridiculous and it's high-time the Board made some cuts.
I do not know the details, but it does seem incompetent to identify German (language of the most important economy in Europe) and the classics as marginal departments which must be eliminated in the name of economic efficiency.
A vendetta against the humanities perhaps, but economic efficiency? Neither are departments likely to have soaring costs: all you need is a classroom and professor. Lecturers in the classics will probably not even break 50k, while language classes are even cheaper since they're often offloaded to graduate students teaching from standard texts. As long as there are students opting to take those courses, they should be printing money for the university.
So unless there has been gross mismanagement of these departments for decades (aggressive hiring and declining enrollment), it is hard to believe that costs could get out of line. And closing down popular and should-be-profitable classes in order to funnel students to other departments in the name of economic efficiency is a very strange move.
>In-state tuition has increased about 275%.
I was thinking about going to graduate school there in 2008, but somehow it was cheaper to take 3 classes remotely at out-of-state rates (at a higher-ranked school, mind you) than to drive 15 miles into town and take 1 class at UVa as an in-state student, so I decided against it.
Edited to add: I later moved to start a PhD program at the other school, stayed here and got a job, so UVa's high tuition indirectly removed me from the pool of people that would work and pay taxes in VA.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate backstory.
The facutly are in revolt because the Board fired the President without warning or stated cause. Eventually, the Board said the cause was that the President, who is in the process of making cuts, was not acting fast enough.
For the other stuff, to add to the budgetary woes, the amount of state money that the public universities in Virginia receive (not just UVA) has dropped significantly.
"the expenditures of the academic division at UVA have increased about 80% since 2001...In-state tuition has increased about 275%."
This says to me that some other source of funding (state subsidy?) has just about disappeared, is that right?
OK, what departments did she want to cut?
Honestly, I've never hard a harder time trying to figure out what an HN story was all about.
A different opinion from a UVA alum:
The "revolt" of the faculty is partially due to the Board wanting to close marginal academic departments because they can't pay for themselves, like Classics (which studies Greek and Latin texts from the founding of Western Civ.) I was not a Classics major and in fact never took a Classics class but many of my friends who are lawyers today were and universities want students like this. Everyone understands that cuts need to be made, but the board seems to fail to understand that making cuts at a university is different than cost-saving measures at a corporation.
Beyond this one issue, the faculty is also responding like this because the Board is acting silently, secretively and hastily in making decisions for the university with little to no participation from faculty or administrators, or even information being provided. At this point, after a week of intense scrutiny and questioning, still no one outside the Board knows exactly why President Sullivan was let go.
In 2003 UVA passed a milestone in that more money came from private donors than public funds. Today UVA's budget includes only 8% being covered by the state. The cuts from the state are very real and very keenly felt. UVA is on a tricky path to become a true hybrid private/public school and the questions facing the faculty and the Board are not whether this should happen, but how.
Furthermore, to rebut some of your points a) It's not insane to have 3300 faculty when many of those are working directly on research or employed at the medical center. (I believe this to be the case given that on average about 1000 faculty are employed through the medical center http://www.web.virginia.edu/iaas/data_catalog/institutional/...) b) The expenditures have increased in an attempt at keeping close with peer institutions for salary and other options. Realistically, despite these attempts the faculty at UVA could easily head to competitive private or public schools and make more money, and will probably be doing so in massive numbers over the next few years following this fiasco. c) I am not sure where you are basing your correlation that this faculty growth has happened at the expense of students. If it has been driven by the growth of costs at the Medical Center that is a source of income as well. If it's been driven by academic faculty then its either been funding research to increase the number of accolades achieved by our faculty (thereby increasing the ranking of the school) or it has been hiring more professors or paying teaching faculty more to keep them from leaving, which would seem to directly benefit students.
What about the change in money brought in due to research done (aka the main revenue generator for academic institutions)?
Also, do you have a source for the 80% growth?
Additional backstory for those not gleaning sufficient context from either the HN title or Bill Wulf's resignation letter (echoing another comment: more a resume than a list of wrongs).
From the Slate article below: On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, “radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...
"Sullivan is an esteemed sociologist who specialized in class dynamics and the role of debt"
Actually kind of a revealing sentence.
Apologies in advance for the off-topic comment. But in looking for more information on this story, I read http://hamptonroads.com/2012/06/amid-uproar-uva-moves-replac... the Virginian Pilot. Which is not the item.
The item is: I have never in my life read such civilized and respectful comments from blog or newspaper readers who clearly disagree with each other on an important issue. My goodness! Is this a regular feature of Southern U.S. life?
Virginia -- particularly Charlottesville and Richmond -- is not some Southern stereotype.
That being said, I think the people most interested in this news are those with vested interests in Virginia higher education -- alums, donors, etc. -- and that tends to raise the average level of discourse.
The comments found in that post you linked to is indeed a "breath of fresh air" to read through in the sense that differentiating opinions can still hold respect one for another.
Thanks for sharing this. I found it very encouraging.
I grew up in Virginia Beach -- you won't find much in the way of overheated rhetoric in the public discourse.
Edit: Sorry, getting frustrated by the other comments about the south. It's nothing to do with your comment.
Beyond the politics (which the Board of Visitors appears to have handled distressingly badly), there's an interesting analogy to software design lurking in the story.
It seems like the philosophical conflict that drove Sullivan't dismissal maps cleanly to the two styles of programming that pg described in "Programming Bottom-Up":
"It's worth emphasizing that bottom-up design doesn't mean just writing the same program in a different order. When you work bottom-up, you usually end up with a different program. Instead of a single, monolithic program, you will get a larger language with more abstract operators, and a smaller program written in it. Instead of a lintel, you'll get an arch."
My reading of Dragas's and Sullivan's statements to the Board of Visitors is that Dragas wants the University designed as a lintel, and Sullivan as an arch.
Dragas argues that "the Board is the one entity that has a unique vantage point that enables us to oversee the big picture of those interactions, and how the leadership shapes the strategic trajectory of the University." [1] The changes Dragas seems to support (though it's hard to find a clear statement of them anywhere?) would be akin to a major rewrite from scratch. University design by lintel.
Sullivan conversely argues that, "[c]orporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university." She seems to be arguing for incremental changes more akin to aggressive refactoring.
[1] http://cvillenews.com/2012/06/18/dragas-sullivan-statements/
"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity." — W.A. Wulf
As an alumnus of the University of Virginia in Computer Engineering, kudos Professor Wulf.
Thank you.
You've just given me my #1 salvo against systemd :)
Anybody else completely lost on this?
There's really no explanation in the link.
I read the whole thing and have no idea why he's resigning, or even who he is or why I should care.
"Being President was a full time job in DC..." made me chuckle, though.
To be clear, this isn't some random professor:
My wife (Anita Jones) and I are in Computer Science and we both hold the title University Professor — the highest rank at UVa. Of the 3300 faculty at UVa, roughly 13 hold that title.
And, not just a cranky emeritus:
"I was President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 11 years."
He may be impressive, but he also sounds like an entitled baby boomer who thinks he should get more and more tuition dollars from young people in the name of "academic freedom." His resignation letter is devoid of even a sop to the budget crisis that has forced the Board to cut departments in lieu of raising tuition beyond the 275% the University has raised it in the last decade.
The article in the Washington Post mentioned that the Board was unhappy that the ousted President wouldn't cut "obscure" programs like German and classics.
Guess who majored in that obscure field of study? Tim O'Reilly, and he talks about how studying Classics helped him decode trends in technology.
I'm an alum of the Engineering school, but I wouldn't have attended UVA were it not for the strength of some of these obscure programs. Monied interests are ruining this institution in the name of profit.
Reads more like a resume than reasons for leaving.
Well, it's both, I guess. He uses the extreme body of work to explain that he's got the experience and then some to tell them that this is a managerial and academic failure of nearly unprecedented proportions.
He's not some tenured professor sequestered in the bubble of academia.
At a school that large they need to defend why their leaving matters.
UVA = U.VA. = U. of VA. = the University of Virgina.
The lack of "strategic dynamism" part is hilarious:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-co...
For background and context, please see http://leiterreports.typepad.com/
NEWSFLASH: the Vice-Rector has resigned. Let's hope that Rector Dragass [sic] resigns too.
Very sad to see. We need to save public higher education in this country, especially at the most elite institutions that actually have a chance to compete with the privates.
Bill Wulf who? I spent 5 years at UVA, graduating with honors and an MCS in 2005, but never had a single interaction with him. Ironically I did meet interim pres Carl Z at a breakfast for corporate recruiters last year and was impressed by his welcoming honesty. My anecdotes only reinforce what is obvious: Bill is a peripheral academic overdue for retirement, Carl Z was rightfully recognized, and UVA is in safe hands.
this is Bill Wulf, compiler hacker extraordinaire, designer of Bliss programming language and optimization pioneer.
One of my personal heroes.
Anyone have any sources for what the situation is?
By this email I am submitting my resignation, effective immediately. I do not wish to be associated with an institution being as badly run as the current UVa. A BOV that so poorly understands UVa, and academic culture more generally, is going to make a lot more dumb decisions, so the University is headed for disaster, and I don’t want to be any part of that. And, frankly, I think you should be ashamed to be party to this debacle!
Is this real? That's barely proper English, and certainly not something I would submit to an (interim) university President.
I know this letter was written for a UVA audience but there is almost no actual rhetoric about why he believes the administration to be wrong. I understand the power of losing every title and honor on your own,..but why not put more Ome into drafting a concise and powerful argument?
I don't like the letter. He spent too much time talking about his "experience". Oh come on. It's like "dude I am a Nobel prize winner, and none of you have that title so I am right." I hate people giving that kind of resignation, regardless of their intentions.
I don't know the professor, but seems like he's sticking the school with a problem in the fall with his sudden resignation.
It it ethical to publish someone resignal letter?
William Wulf is a seriously big deal in my book.
THAT IS HOW YOU DO IT LIKE A BOSS!
I guess being a women in Virgina is an endangered species. Seems all they're good for is government forced medical examinations.
Guess you get what you vote for in a guy like McDonald.