When Teresa A. Sullivan was reinstated as the University of Virginia’s president this summer, she asked for nothing more than a new start with the board members who had wanted her gone just days before.
“There were no conditions on either side,” Ms. Sullivan said in an interview on Monday. “The board didn’t set any for me. I didn’t set any for them. To the extent possible, I think our philosophy was, Let’s just press reset. Obviously you can’t act like nothing happened. Something happened.”
What happened is now well known. Ms. Sullivan was forced out by the leaders of the board in June, only to be rehired two weeks later amid furious protest from the faculty, students, and alumni.
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The board’s handling of Ms. Sullivan’s resignation is now the subject of an investigation by the university’s accrediting agency, the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. In a rare move for a college president, Ms. Sullivan has declined to serve as the university’s representative during the investigation because it ultimately centers on whether her ouster violated principles of accreditation.
“I realized this was all about me,” Ms. Sullivan said on Monday. “That puts me in a conflict of interest.”
Given the circumstances, the commission has agreed to allow John D. Simon, Virginia’s provost, to serve as the university’s representative. The university has until September 1 to respond to the agency’s inquiry.
At the heart of the commission’s probe is whether Virginia’s board followed its own policies when Ms. Sullivan was asked to resign. The board’s rector and vice rector presented Ms. Sullivan with a separation agreement, and gave her 24 hours to sign it, before any vote of the full board or even its executive committee had been taken.
Given the continuing investigation, Ms. Sullivan said she could not comment on whether the board’s process was legitimate.
Ms. Sullivan said on Monday that she had given little thought to fighting her ouster. Helen E. Dragas, the rector, had told the president that 15 of the board’s 16 members were prepared to terminate her, Ms. Sullivan said. The rector, who met with Ms. Sullivan late on the afternoon of June 8, told Ms. Sullivan to consider the separation agreement that night, but instructed her not to discuss it with anyone other than her family and a lawyer.
“It was a period of some introspection, mostly with me and my husband,” said Ms. Sullivan, whose husband, Douglas Laycock, is a law professor at Virginia. “But I decided it was probably best for the university not to force the issue with a public meeting, which would have been the alternative.”
Online Education
In the two weeks that followed Ms. Sullivan’s resignation, e-mails and memos were made public that suggested her differences with the board centered on the pace of change at Virginia, specifically in the area of online education. But Ms. Sullivan seems reluctant or unable to say what the rift was really about, noting that different board members had different areas of concern.
“I’m going to speculate here: I think there might have been board members who thought we weren’t even thinking about” online education, she said. “But that wasn’t true. In fact, there was a huge debate and discussion going on among lots of people.”
What does seem clear is that Ms. Sullivan and some board members disagreed about how a college president should lead a conversation about the use of technology in the classroom.
“There are board members who might have felt that if I were not personally directing it from the president’s office, at Madison Hall, that I wasn’t really in charge,” she said.
“There is so much expertise that we can draw on, so there’s a certain amount of hubris in assuming that the president is going to tell those people what to do,” she continued. “I came to an institution that was ranked, depending on the ranking you use, No. 1 or No. 2 among American public institutions. I’m going to come in and tell them what to do to be better? There’s a certain superciliousness to that concept.”
Since Ms. Sullivan was reinstated, the university has announced plans to join a dozen institutions that will be offering free courses worldwide through a start-up company called Coursera. University officials said discussions about joining the group predated Ms. Sullivan’s resignation.
While some of Virginia’s board members appear to view online education as a way to change the university’s business model, Ms. Sullivan does not see Coursera as any kind of silver bullet.
“There is no obvious way to raise revenues from this,” she said.
But Ms. Sullivan, who is a sociologist, said she is intrigued by the possibility that online education will change how professors teach and students learn.
Mum on Former Lieutenant
Few college presidents would appear to have a base of support as broad and engaged as the one that rallied behind Ms. Sullivan, and governance experts say it is reasonable to question the circumstances under which any board would ever again attempt to remove her. But Ms. Sullivan said she is not invulnerable.
“For any president, let alone a president of a public institution, to take that attitude is deadly,” she said.
It is still too early to tell how Ms. Sullivan will use her new lease on the presidency. One of her first official acts was to accept the resignation of Michael Strine, who stepped down as Virginia’s executive vice president and chief operating officer this month.
Mr. Strine’s back-channel communications with board members, as demonstrated in e-mails made public in recent months, prompted some to question his loyalty to Ms. Sullivan, who had hand-picked him in 2011 as one of her lieutenants.
In Monday’s wide-ranging interview with Ms. Sullivan, the subject of Mr. Strine prompted the most tight-lipped of responses from the president.
“It was a personnel decision, and I’d prefer not to talk about it,” she said.
But what of Mr. Strine’s severance package of $847,308? She would not discuss that either.
Ms. Sullivan said that the search for a new chief operating officer will be “truncated,” and that candidates from the previous search may be considered.
Governor’s Request
To do her job effectively, Ms. Sullivan will now have to work with some board members who either acquiesced in her ouster or advocated it. While Ms. Sullivan does not get to choose her board, she said the onus is on her to ensure effective communication with its members.
“What I don’t want to be insulated from is concerns that board members have,” she said.
Contrary to reports that suggested otherwise, Ms. Sullivan said she never insisted that her return would be contingent on Ms. Dragas’s leaving the board.
The reports “weren’t true,” Ms. Sullivan said. “I spoke with my lawyer about this, and he said, ‘You could issue a denial,’ and I figured, well, that’s just one more media cycle, so I’m not going to issue a denial. There were no conditions out there.”
Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican who reappointed Ms. Dragas to the board in June, specifically asked Ms. Sullivan not to publicly weigh in on the issue of board appointments.
In a phone conversation several days before the board voted to reinstate the president, Mr. McDonnell asked that Ms. Sullivan not say anything that would “put any limitations on me,” she recalled.
Ms. Sullivan said she had often been questioned about why she would return to Virginia, given all that has transpired. It was in response to that line of questioning from The Chronicle that she appeared the most resolute.
“At some point in the 18 days, the e-mail changed from ‘We’re so sorry it happened’ to ‘Please stay,’” Ms. Sullivan said. “I just felt I couldn’t turn my back on this. I couldn’t turn my back on these people. I couldn’t turn my back on what we were trying to accomplish.
“Virginia matters,” she continued. “The success of the University of Virginia in the long run matters for all of public higher education, and it matters to me. And that’s why I didn’t want to turn my back on it.”