It may not be strictly partisan politics, but there looks to be politics aplenty in the ouster of the U. of Virginia's president

The rotunda of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, designed by the university's 1819 founder, former President Thomas Jefferson

"If there's a reason to do it, it should be a very serious and substantive reason. We have a whole new administrative team. You would have thought that they'd want to give the team, now that it's together, more of a chance to work together."

-- University of Virginia law professor and Faculty Senate chair George Cohen, on the sudden ouster of President Terry Sullivan last Sunday

by Ken

It was just a week ago today that, following a secretly rigged "emergency" meeting of the executive committee of the governing Board of Visitors, a meeting announced only that morning and consisting of the bare minimum of three members, the University of Virginia community learned that President Terry Sullivan, on the job for only two years and apparently highly popular in that community, had agreed to step down as of August 15, as the end product of a putsch organized by the board's head, Rector Helen Dragas, a Virginia Beach developer.

From the "Remarks of Rector Helen Dragas, meeting with vice presidents and deans" of the University of Virginia on June 10, as released by the university:

We deeply appreciate all that Terry has given to the University over the last two years. We like and respect Terry, and she has done many things well. Her broad engagement with all parts of the University community was refreshing to students, faculty, and staff, parents, and alumni. Her increased presence in Washington and abroad was commendable. Her administration's work with you on the initiation of the internal budget model has been a significant step towards creating an important tool for change. 


Nevertheless, the Board feels strongly and overwhelmingly that we need bold and proactive leadership on tackling the difficult issues that we face. The pace of change in higher education and in health care has accelerated greatly in the last two years. We have calls internally for resolution of tough financial issues that require hard decisions on resource allocation. The compensation of our valued faculty and staff has continued to decline in real terms, and we acknowledge the tremendous task ahead of making star hires to fill the many spots that will be vacated over the next few years as our eminent faculty members retire in great numbers. These challenges are truly an existential threat to the greatness of UVA.


We see no bright lights on the financial horizon as we face limits on tuition increases, an environment of declining federal support, state support that will be flat at best, and pressures on health care payors. This means that as an institution, we have to be able to prioritize and reallocate the resources we do have, and that our best avenue for increasing resources will be through passionate articulation of a vision and effective development efforts to support it. We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.


We want UVA to remain in that top echelon of universities well into the 21st century and beyond. We want this to be a place that lives up to Mr. Jefferson’s founding vision of excellence. We want it to be a place that attracts the best and the brightest in scholarship, teaching, patient care, and community service.


To achieve these aspirations, the Board feels the need for a bold leader who can help develop, articulate, and implement a concrete and achievable strategic plan to re-elevate the University to its highest potential. We need a leader with a great willingness to adapt the way we deliver our teaching, research, and patient care to the realities of the external environment. We need a leader who is able to passionately convey a vision to our community, and effectively obtain gifts and buy-in towards our collective goals.



The Board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource development and in resource prioritization and allocation. We do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast. . . .

That's a lot of words, and especially a lot of words that say very little. And it's important because this remains, as far as I know, the only clue to the putsch completed last Sunday with the forced removal of President Sullivan, "because of an apparently abrupt rift between her and the school's governing board," as the Washington Post team that reported her ouster put it.

You don't have to take my word that Rector Dragas's "explanation" of the move is opaque. Amid the firestorm that erupted within the university community -- which seems to admired and approved of Sullivan's performance-to-date -- when the theretofore secret campaign against the president was made public as a fait accompli, it seems clear that nobody else who read it knew what it means either. From the first WaPo report:

"If there's a reason to do it, it should be a very serious and substantive reason," said George Cohen, a law professor who chairs the Faculty Senate. "We have a whole new administrative team. You would have thought that they'd want to give the team, now that it's together, more of a chance to work together." Cohen said Sullivan's departure came as a "complete surprise."

You could read Rector Dragas's statement as saying that President Sullivan wasn't paying faculty members enough, but does anyone believe that? It does seem possible, though, that there are certain kinds of professors Rector Dragas and her cronies would like to see hired.

You can certainly see a concern about money, but it's hard to imagine that President Sullivan would have disagreed about that. She might, however, have been unenthusiastic about Rector Dragas apparent vision of a cash-rich future for UVa as an online diploma mill -- a "University of Phoenix"-esque hustle of questionable suitability for what has long been one of the country's most-admired public universities. The fact is, though, that for all the statement's talk of "vision" and "realities," I don't think we're going to find out what Rector Dragas means by either until we see the replacement president she comes up with. And I think she's established that, whatever the actual search mechanism is, the choice will be basically hers.

And the manner of the rector's ouster of her friend Terry certainly warrants attention. It appears that she never raised the subject with the entire governing board. No meetings regarding the president's performance seem to have been held. Instead the rector appears to have conducted her removal campaign on a one-to-one basis, recruting voting board members one by one until she had enough votes to achieve the ouster, at which point she seems to have apprised the soon-to-be ex-president of the facts on the ground, to encourage her to go quietly, as she in fact did. This is apparently within the rules of the university but surely smacks of private agendas and strongly suggests that: (a) secrecy was a crucial consideration, and (b) the rector couldn't have made any better case to the full board than she made in this bizarre "statement."

Not surprisingly, the first question that seems to have occurred to most interested parties is the role played by politics -- and not just university politics, which undoubtedly play a major role in the functioning of every university trustee board everywhere, and especially the boards of public universities. No, the questions concerned more overt politics, considering the rapid change in the composition of the UVa board since intensely right-wing Gov. Bob McDonnell took office in January 2010. (The governor appoints the governing "boards of visitors" of all of Virginia's state universities.)

The 16-member board is now evenly split between McDonnell appointees and members appointed in 2008 by former Gov. Tim Kaine. But Rector Dragas, who ascended to the rectorship last summer, is herself a 2008 Kaine appointee, and the Democratic-appointed trustees don't appear to be a notably more high-minded group than the all-business-friendly McDonnell appointees. (For a closer look at the appointment process and the current board membership, check out the WaPo follow-up piece, "U-Va. president's ouster puts spotlight on governing board.") Vice Rector Mark Kington, an Alexandria business executive clearly heavily involved in the ouster, was reported in another Post follow-up piece (" Three members of U-Va. board were kept in dark about effort to oust Sullivan") to have been "in business with Sen. Mark R. Warner (D)" -- again not exactly a ringing endorsement when it comes to an enlightened view of university policy issues. It's very much of a piece with the increasingly prevalent hostility in the country to actual knowledge and learning of the sort that universities have traditionally been thought to exist to foster.

McDonnell was quick to insist that he had had no involvement in the Sullivan ouster, and I suppose it's possible that this is true, although it seems to me equally possible that it isn't. The governor doesn't have an especially impressive record for truthfulness, and there's always the cloak of plausible deniability. In any case, we still don't know what "vision" is driving Rector Dragas.

By the way, in the matter of what Governor Bob did or didn't know, that last-cited WaPo piece, "Three members of U-Va. board were kept in dark about effort to oust Sullivan," begins:

At least three members of the 16-person Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia were not privy to the campaign to remove President Teresa Sullivan and learned of it, as she did, in conversations with the board’s leader late last week.

University Rector Helen E. Dragas said the board had voiced "overwhelming support" to replace Sullivan, who resigned Sunday. A spokesman for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who was not involved in the decision, said he was told it was unanimous.

But some board members who had supported Sullivan knew nothing of the plan to remove her until Dragas notified them late last week, according to former board members and a university official with knowledge of the situation but who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Dragas said the board's concerns with Sullivan's leadership had been the subject of "ongoing dialogue" for "an extended period of time." She declined to comment on this issue Thursday, saying it was a personnel matter.

The move to replace Sullivan after less than two years has thrown the historic campus in Charlottesville into turmoil. On Thursday, the Executive Council of the university's Faculty Senate passed a unanimous resolution voicing lack of confidence in the rector, vice rector and the entire Board of Visitors. The faculty group expressed strong support for Sullivan.

The report goes on to say that when the rector had assembled enough dump-Sullivan votes, she "phoned McDonnell to inform him. He and his staff were surprised, but have not questioned the decision or involved themselves in the aftermath."

Pols of both parties are quoted questioning the process by which the ouster was accomplished, though the "R" is a mere ex-govenor, accent on the "ex."

"They have a duty to be more transparent," said former governor James S. Gilmore III (R), who tried to reform the way members of the Boards of Visitors were selected when he was governor. "They have a duty to tell the public what they're doing."

Emergency meetings do not require the same three-day notice as other board meetings. The notice for the Sunday meeting went public around 9 a.m. Sunday.

House Minority Leader David J. Toscano (D-Charlottesville) said he was troubled that the board effectively took action without a meeting, and that Sunday’s meeting involved only three people.

"It just boggles my mind," he said. "You might run a company like that but this is a public institution and a small number of people should not be making a decision."

Now if you truly believe that a change of administration is necessary, you shouldn't be stopped by considerations of the turmoil that's inevitable when you subject the institution to another transition after only two years, but surely you have to take it into consideration. Presumably Rector Dragas did so, and was persuaded -- and managed to persuade enough like-minded trustees -- that such a price had to be paid. She just doesn't seem to have felt compelled to let anyone else in on the reasons.

In today's WaPo report ("U-Va. Faculty Senate to meet in emergency session Sunday over Teresa Sullivan's ouster"), a picture begins to emerge of the actual basis of the Dragas group's concerns, which as best I can glean were never discussed with anyone who didn't agree, including nearly the whole of the university committee.

Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

Sullivan’s position was clear. In a cordial Q and A posted to a U-Va. news site in March, Sullivan was asked whether there was “room to reduce spending.” Her reply: “[I]n terms of big areas where there are obvious cost savings, I don’t think we have those. . . . ” The university was already “pretty lean,” she said. “I worry about getting very much leaner.’’

Supporters say Sullivan was a consummate public university president who understood finance as well as anyone on campus.

“Terry is the farthest thing from a fuzzy-headed academic,” said Austin Ligon, a former U-Va. board member. “She mastered the way public higher education finance worked, and that was one of the strengths that led us to hire her."

Of course, what are described as "obscure academic departments" are usually a crucial component of any university that takes itself seriously as a university with academic stature. I mean, are we really talking about a university pretending to academic seriousness without a classics department? It may be no surprise that the putsch-makers, while paying lip service to the university's stature, didn't want any public discussion of their vision of financial "realities."

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