[Infowarrior] - UVA Board Votes to Reinstate Sullivan

[Richard Forno]

June 26, 2012

U. of Virginia Board Votes to Reinstate Sullivan
By Sara Hebel, Jack Stripling, and Robin Wilson

http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Virginia-Board-Votes-to/132603

Charlottesville, Va

Teresa A. Sullivan was reinstated as the president of the University of Virginia on Tuesday, completing the arc of an improbable comeback tale that began a little more than two weeks ago with her forced resignation.

The Board of Visitors voted unanimously to restore Ms. Sullivan, the university's first female president, to office. The action reverses her  announcement of 16 days earlier, in which she said she would step down, citing an unspecified "philosophical difference of opinion" with the board.

The resignation stunned many people at Virginia and beyond, coming just two years into Ms. Sullivan's tenure at the helm of one of the  nation's most elite public universities.

In the tumultuous days that followed, faculty, alumni, and students came to the defense of the president, who won praise for her consensus-building style of leadership. Her self-described "incrementalist" approach to change stood in sharp contrast to urgent transformation that leaders of the board, including Helen E. Dragas, the rector, have said the university needs instead.

The resulting showdown between Ms. Sullivan, a sociologist and longtime provost, and Ms. Dragas, a real-estate developer who graduated from the university's graduate school of business, became a stark example of some of the fiercest debates that have been escalating on campuses across the country about the future of higher education. It pitted M.B.A.'s against Ph.D.'s and stirred passions about whether the strategies of the business world should be widely adopted within the academic enterprise.

Pointed public exchanges—including Ms. Sullivan's 14-page defense of her record and Ms. Dragas's 10-point accounting of "the serious strategic challenges that alarmed us"—grappled with some of the thorniest issues facing higher education. They include how public universities must work to overcome dwindling financial resources and how the nation's top institutions should transform with technology, blending brick-and-mortar education with online, open-course endeavors.

At a university that takes special pride in its rigorous codes of honor, the process by which Ms. Sullivan was pressured to resign sparked some of the greatest outrage. Among the quotes by Thomas Jefferson, the university's founder, most commonly cited by Ms. Sullivan's supporters was this: "It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it." Tougher criticism came at the beginning of a video circulated in recent days by students and alumni who favored Ms. Sullivan's reinstatement. It opens with this quote by Mr. Jefferson: "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of conscience to remain silent."

Forces of Change

Ms. Sullivan resigned on June 10 after she received a visit from Ms. Dragas and the board's vice rector, Mark J. Kington, who has since  resigned. Without convening a meeting of the full Board of Visitors or publicly detailing their criticism of her leadership, they told Ms. Sullivan that they had the votes to oust her. E-mail exchanges between Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington, which were later made public by The Cavalier Daily, showed that the two had been plotting Ms. Sullivan's departure for several weeks.

In May, Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington a link to a press release from 2005, in which Cornell University's president, Jeffrey S. Lehman, notified the chairman he would step down, "citing differences with the board regarding the strategy for realizing Cornell's long-term vision." A week later, the two exchanged messages about a price quote they received from a consulting company for a "strategic communication project." When Ms. Dragas sent Ms. Sullivan a message on June 7, saying she and Mr. Kington would be in Charlottesville the next day and "would appreciate a meeting with you," the president appeared oblivious to the board members' agenda. She replied to their request and asked, "Is there anything you would like me to prepare?"

Ms. Dragas later apologized for the "pain, anger, and confusion" that had swept the grounds of the university in the wake of her meeting with the president and the announcement of her resignation. But the rector also reiterated the need for a change at the top, saying that, "In my view, we did the right thing, the wrong way."

"Despite the enduring magic of Mr. Jefferson's University," Ms. Dragas wrote, "the bottom line is the days of incremental decision-making in higher education are over, or should be."

The e-mail exchanges between the rector and Mr. Kington demonstrated that the two had been reading widely and regularly about the forces transforming higher education. They traded a number of e-mails with attached articles from The Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, many of them about online education and the open-course ventures in which top research universities like Harvard, Stanford, and others, are engaged. As she forwarded one article, Ms. Dragas said it illustrated "why we can't afford to wait."

That piece, published in the Journal, was written by John E. Chubb, interim chief executive of Education Sector, an independent think tank, and a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and by Terry M. Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at Hoover. They wrote about edX, in which Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined to host free online courses, and about "higher education's online revolution" more broadly.

"The nation, and the world," they wrote, "are in the early stages of a historic transformation."

So, too, is the University of Virginia, both Ms. Dragas and Ms. Sullivan agree. Where they disagree is in the pace at which that change should happen and how.

Ms. Wilson reported from Charlottesville. Ms. Hebel and Mr. Stripling reported from Washington.


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