A Stunning Ouster in Tennessee Gets Ugly and Feels Like Political Payback

The sudden firing on Wednesday of Beverly J. Davenport, the first female chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, stunned and angered her supporters on the flagship campus and raised the specter of more political retribution and legislative meddling in a state that has earned a reputation for it.

At a minimum, it was another ugly breakup in a system where personnel matters often get personal.

In a scathing letter that was made public Wednesday afternoon, Joseph A. DiPietro, the system’s president, detailed what he described as Davenport’s significant shortcomings: She was, he said, a poor communicator, a bad team player, and someone resistant to necessary professional coaching. The only nice thing that DiPietro had to say to the chancellor, who enjoys significant campus-level support, was “Dear Beverly.”

No doubt, Davenport has suffered self-inflicted wounds. During the university’s recent search for a head football coach, Tennessee appeared to accede to fan outrage and withdrew an offer to a leading candidate, inviting a public-relations meltdown that raised deeper questions about the competence and confidence of the leadership in Knoxville.

But is this chancellor’s dismissal about a six-month-old sports debacle? Not likely and at least not entirely.

Over the course of her brief time in office, barely a year, Davenport has been pulled into culture wars and political spats that are common to Tennessee and many public universities across the nation. She sided against the governor, who wanted the system’s universities to outsource their facilities operations — a move that some expected to drive down wages and hurt working conditions.

She took heat for defending “Sex Week,” a student sex-education program that has drawn fire from evangelicals and conservatives. She secured private funding for a gay-pride center after the legislature stripped money for it from the campus’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Many of those battles predated Davenport’s tenure, but she did little to court conservative lawmakers, who’ve long had their doubts about Knoxville.

“We’re regarded as being like a Berkeley of East Tennessee, so the red-state legislators find things to find fault in us,” said Beauvais Lyons, president of the Faculty Senate and an art professor.

As with many on the campus, Lyons said he was taken aback by the dismissal, which is effective July 1.

“Chancellor Davenport has come here and won the hearts of students and faculty, and she has done everything we have sought to do in terms of our academic goals and mission,” he said. “This decision is going to be met with strong resistance from students and faculty and staff alike.”

Davenport and DiPietro did not respond to interview requests.

Us vs. Them

The president’s blistering letter to Davenport spoke to longstanding tensions between the flagship, which enjoys a high national profile, and the system of two other campuses, a health-science center, and three institutes.

“You have not acclimated yourself to the UT system and still appear unwilling to try to understand or acknowledge the value of the UT system,” DiPietro wrote. “I continue to detect that you (and some members of your cabinet) have an ‘us (UTK) vs. them (UT system and UT Board)’ mentality.”

This is an old story for public-university systems. Flagship campuses, which have grown in prestige and acclaim through research and athletics, are often criticized as being insufficiently collaborative within their systems. Some campuses have sought more autonomy or tried to break off on their own, and invariably there is conflict.

DiPietro’s letter, however, personalizes this national phenomenon of flagship-system tension, and attaches it to Davenport as a professional shortcoming, maybe even a character flaw.

“The relationship between us, as well as that between you (and some members of your cabinet) and some on my leadership team, continues to be unsatisfactory,” DiPietro wrote. “More times than I find acceptable, there has been a lack of trust, collaboration, communication, and transparency in these relationships, and it has been counterproductive to the collective success of the university.”

Lyons, the Faculty Senate president, described the letter as “pretty insulting.”

“It’s as if his feelings have been hurt by the chancellor,” Lyons said. “This is like some Game of Thrones drama here, and the fact is that the chancellor has done a lot to ingratiate herself to the students and the faculty. This is not going to be an amicable separation.”

This isn’t new for Tennessee. Jimmy G. Cheek, Davenport’s predecessor, by all accounts left of his own accord. But he endured the same political battles over gay pride and Sex Week. Loren W. Crabtree, who resigned in 2008, clashed with the president at the time, John D. Petersen, who abruptly resigned about a year later.

Dissent From the Faculty

As with other chancellors before her, Davenport learned the hard way that the Tennessee Vols’ football faithful are rowdy, opinionated, and tough to please. By most estimations, the university’s attempt to hire a new head football coach in 2017 was a disaster.

The university had planned to hire Greg Schiano, a defensive coordinator at Ohio State, only to reverse course when furious fans seized on a disputed claim that he had failed to report Jerry Sandusky, then an assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University, for sexually abusing a boy in the early 1990s, during Schiano’s years as a coach there.

Publicly, Knoxville’s reversal tracked as a capitulation to the demands of an angry mob that was more concerned about the coach’s pedigree than anything else.

The chancellor said she deeply regretted what had happened — not specifying what exactly she regretted — and threw her support behind John Currie, the athletics director. Then she fired him.

In his letter to the chancellor, DiPietro declined to mention specific missteps she had made. But he spared little in a public treatise that attacked the chancellor’s professionalism and focus.

“We really think he should explain to the faculty what he was referring to in some of these statements,” said Bonnie H. Ownley, past president of the Faculty Senate and a professor of plant pathology.

When the surprising news spread in Knoxville on Wednesday, students staged an impromptu rally. Morgan J. Hartgrove, the student-body president, said she and her classmates were angry and confused by the decision.

“It’s a shock, and people are devastated,” she said. “She has done so much for this university in such a short amount of time.”

Hartgrove described Davenport as a highly visible chancellor who accepted every invitation to student events.

“When students found out, they immediately said we’re taking action,” Hartgrove said. “They love her.”

The president, it would seem, does not.

Read the letter from the Tennessee system president to the Knoxville campus’s chancellor here:

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.