The Faculty Senate at the University of Virginia emerged as one of the major power brokers in the successful effort to reinstate Teresa A. Sullivan as the university’s president. Here are two of the leading professors behind the effort:
George M. Cohen, 51, is a law professor who holds a named chair and has been at Virginia since 1992. It was his dean who first asked him to serve on the Faculty Senate. Mr. Cohen became chairman on June 1 after his fellow senators thought he did a good job of listening to various views and forming a consensus.
He was the one who drafted most of the senate’s statements during the Sullivan affair, including the one supporting the president and the resolution expressing the senate’s lack of confidence in the Board of Visitors. He was also the senate’s point person with the media and attempted to answer all of the e-mails the senate received from other faculty and staff members asking questions, offering ideas, and expressing opinions.
On the Rotunda steps, before the board meeting in which Ms. Sullivan was reinstated, Mr. Cohen was the one who formally addressed the hundreds of professors, alumni, students, and community members gathered on the Lawn. President Sullivan, he said, has embodied—and acted upon—a set of a principles: honesty, candor, openness, inclusion, consultation, communication, fairness, dignity, and trust.
“These are time-honored principles,” says Mr. Cohen, “and they work.”
Gweneth L. West, 63, is a professor of drama in the College of Arts and Sciences and head of costume design at the university. She is a former chairman of the Faculty Senate and heads its Committee on Collaboration, Communication, and Engagement.
Ms. West was in her car at a church parking lot on June 10 when a friend called to tell her Ms. Sullivan had stepped down. The idea was so shocking that at first the news didn’t register. “I said: ‘Terry who?’” Ms. West recalls.
Then, she says, she thought: “This isn’t going to work.”
As the controversy unfolded, one of Ms. West’s roles was to be the Faculty Senate’s intelligence gatherer, talking widely to administrators, staff members, and professors to get a sense of what people were thinking and feeling. She also had a good sense of how the senate’s actions might be received, and how the senate needed to tweak its statements to be acceptable to a large number of people.
“I’ve been the voice-to-voice, face-to-face person over on Grounds talking to people,” she says.
Ms. West’s sense of drama also put her front-and-center on the Rotunda steps before the board meeting in which Ms. Sullivan was reinstated. As the meeting began inside, she led the crowd outside in 16 minutes of silence, one for every day since Ms. Sullivan had been removed.
