In the weeks leading up to the resignation of Teresa A. Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, the leaders of the board that forced her out of office traded a number of e-mails with attached articles about the forces transforming higher education, telling one another that the articles illustrated “why we can’t afford to wait.”
In many of the e-mails, which were obtained by The Cavalier Daily, the rector and vice rector of the Board of Visitors—Helen E. Dragas and Mark J. Kington, respectively—commented on articles about online education and the open-course ventures in which top research universities like Harvard, Stanford, and others, are engaged.
The exchanges included one about Udacity, the free education platform that grew out of a Stanford University professor’s course. In an e-mail on June 3, Jeffrey C. Walker, a member of the Board of Trustees for the foundation of the university’s McIntire School of Commerce, urged Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington to check out a video of a talk by Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford computer-science professor who founded Udacity.
Mr. Walker said the Berklee College of Music was going to have its board, of which Mr. Walker is a member, watch the video “as a signal that the on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind.”
“How are we thinking about it at UVA?” Mr. Walker continued. “How might it lower our costs, improve productivity and link us to a group of students we couldn’t afford to serve (maybe more kids from the state to please the legislature) ... maybe more second career grads?”
Ms. Dragas replied, “Your timing is impeccable— the BOV is squarely focused on UVA’S developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly accelerating pace of change.”
By then, Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington, who resigned on Tuesday from the board, had already been laying the groundwork for a leadership transition, the e-mails show. On May 31, the two exchanged messages about a price quote they received from a consulting company for a “strategic communication project.” A week earlier, on May 24, Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington an e-mail with a subject line, “Transition press release.” It contained a link to a press release from 2005, in which Cornell University’s president, Jeffrey S. Lehman, had notified the chairman he would step down, “citing differences with the board regarding the strategy for realizing Cornell’s long-term vision.”
Four days after her e-mail exchange with Mr. Walker, Ms. Dragas sent a message to Ms. Sullivan. The rector said she and Mr. Kington would both be in Charlottesville the next day “and would appreciate a meeting with you.” Ms. Sullivan replied the next day and asked, “Is there anything you would like me to prepare?”
On June 10, Ms. Sullivan and the board announced her resignation.
‘Rather Pedestrian Answer’
Among the articles that Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington shared was an opinion piece that appeared in The Chronicle, expressing the need for innovation in higher education and warning of the consequences of resisting change. The article, by Ann Kirschner, university dean of the City University of New York’s honors college, said college leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it’s too late.
“Good article” was the subject line of the e-mail, sent less than a week before Ms. Sullivan resigned, in which Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington the article.
Similarly, Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington an message a few days earlier in which the subject line read, “good piece in WSJ today—why we can’t afford to wait.”
The Wall Street Journal piece 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, are in the early stages of a historic transformation,” they wrote, “in how students learn, teachers teach, and schools and school systems are organized.”
Earlier, in May, Mr. Kington sent Ms. Dragas an opinion piece from The New York Times by David Brooks about “the campus tsunami.” In it, Mr. Brooks argued that “what happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web and online learning.”
Ms. Dragas thanked Mr. Kington and said, “I have others like this from The Chronicle of Higher Education that I’ll share with you.” She went on to say that she had had “interesting discussions” with the university’s executive vice president and its executive vice president and provost “that I look forward to sharing with you next week.”
In the e-mails, Ms. Dragas, Mr. Kington, and others appeared to believe that Ms. Sullivan was not doing enough to embrace change, or to press for it quickly enough at the University of Virginia.
In an e-mail exchange on the day Ms. Sullivan resigned, Mr. Kington received an e-mail, which he forwarded to Ms. Dragas, from Jeffrey D. Nuechterlein, a venture capitalist and trustee of the University’s College Foundation. Mr. Nuechterlein said he had received “scores of e-mails on this today” and that a statement by Ms. Dragas had been “helpful for giving people more color on the situation.” He then cited his concerns with Ms. Sullivan’s approach to online learning.
“One small data point that seems consistent—I was not impressed w[sic] Terry’s rather pedestrian answer,” Mr. Nuechterlein wrote, “to my question at the Sulgrave Club about online learning and what UVA was doing given what Stanford and others had announced.”
That same day, June 10, Mr. Kington sent Ms. Dragas an e-mail in which he forwarded a statement that Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business, made about Ms. Sullivan’s departure. In Mr. Bruner’s statement, which he sent to faculty, alumni, and other supporters of Darden, Mr. Bruner said that the “philosophical difference of opinion” between Ms. Sullivan and the board, cited as the reason for the president’s resignation, had to do with “the rate of change and progress in the face of long range challenges to the University.”
“We at Darden understand the urgency of the issues because we have been grappling with them for several years,” Mr. Bruner said. “This is a moment of unprecedented turmoil in higher education.”
In a comment to Ms. Dragas at the beginning of the e-mail, Mr. Kington praised Mr. Bruner for being “at the top of his game.”
“As you said today,” the vice rector told the rector, “Darden is a near and visible template for much of what we seek.”
Risk, Failure, and Rescue
Besides online learning and the pace of change, the two board leaders also e-mailed about an article about Wesleyan University’s dropping its need-blind admissions policy. In the article, which appeared in Inside Higher Ed, the university said that keeping the policy would require too much money and impose too much debt on some students.
They also shared an article from The New Yorker, a graduation speech about how taking risk is necessary. Titled “Failure and Rescue,” it was the text of the commencement speech delivered this month at Williams College by Atul Gawande, a New Yorker contributor who is a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a professor in the department of health policy and management at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
In the graduation speech, Mr. Gawande wrote that “recognizing that your expectations are proving wrong—accepting that you need a new plan—is commonly the hardest thing to do.”
He told the audience that they would take risks, and they would have failures, but that what happens after they do is what is defining. “The only failure,” Mr. Gawande wrote, “is the failure to rescue something.”
Five days before they announced Ms. Sullivan’s departure, saying that the University of Virginia needed a new plan, Ms. Dragas annotated the graduation speech she forwarded to Mr. Kington this way: “Timely article,” she wrote, “I thought you might enjoy ... “
