If, in parting ways with Teresa A. Sullivan, the University of Virginia is trading the steady pace of change synonymous with her presidency for a new era of “strategic dynamism,” the faculty could be in for a wild ride.
Once confined to corporate boardrooms, the phrase “strategic dynamism” is now all the buzz at Thomas Jefferson’s university. Days after Ms. Sullivan’s resignation under pressure, the term appeared prominently in an e-mail written by Peter D. Kiernan, a powerful Virginia alumnus who claimed to have played an insider’s role in what he described as the “project” to end Ms. Sullivan’s tenure.
Mr. Kiernan, who was chairman of the Darden School Foundation Board, resigned from the board on Thursday amid a furor over the contents of the e-mail and the implication that he may have been acting on behalf of the Darden School—the university’s business school—in helping secure Ms. Sullivan’s ouster. In a written statement, Mr. Kiernan said he had been acting on his own and “not in any official capacity” as a Darden trustee.
The e-mail, which Mr. Kiernan sent to fellow Darden board members, suggested Ms. Sullivan’s resignation would usher in a fast-paced series of unspecified changes.
“The decision of the Board of Visitors to move in another direction stems from their concern that the governance of the university was not sufficiently tuned to the dramatic changes we all face: funding, Internet, technology advances, the new economic model,” Mr. Kiernan wrote in the e-mail, which was published in several Virginia newspapers. “These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning.”
Darden cut its financial ties with the state about a decade ago in exchange for independence. Mr. Kiernan, a former Goldman Sachs partner and president of a billion-dollar hedge fund, is a venture capitalist who lives in Connecticut. He is the author of Becoming China’s Bitch and Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now: A Manifesto for the Radical Center (Turner Publishing Company, 2012).
Virginia faculty, who have broadly questioned Ms. Sullivan’s ouster, are now looking to Mr. Kiernan’s e-mail for clues about the source of what Ms. Sullivan called the “philosophical difference of opinion” between her and the university’s Board of Visitors.
In the absence of any specific reason why a president popular with students and the faculty simply had to go after just two years, the e-mail and other sparse threads of information have drawn unusual attention for the secrets they may hold.
Paul D. Halliday, incoming chair of the history department, said the reasonable desire to speculate is “the single biggest problem we face.”
“We are all operating in a void, and people will fill that void with their fears, their anxieties, and it’s very difficult for an organization to get on with its daily life,” said Mr. Halliday, who was among 33 chairs and program directors to sign an open letter calling on the Board of Visitors to explain its rationale and “reopen discussion” with Ms. Sullivan and the faculty.
The Faculty Senate on Thursday passed a resolution expressing “strong support” for Ms. Sullivan and a “lack of confidence” in the board, specifically its leadership.
In Love With Themselves
So what is “strategic dynamism,” and who are its practitioners? Quite the opposite of the methodical, long-term visions found in most universities’ strategic plans, strategic dynamism implies a near-constant “stirring of the pot” within an organization, explains Donald C. Hambrick, a professor of management at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus.
That could mean wild changes in asset allocation within a company’s investment portfolio or a radical alteration of a business’s marketing approach. Proponents of strategic dynamism value the potential rewards of substantial, fast-paced change more than the stability of a gradual strategic evolution, Mr. Hambrick says.
There’s another thing about executives who embrace strategic dynamism: They’re totally in love with themselves, Mr. Hambrick says. In 2007, Mr. Hambrick co-authored a study that found a strong correlation between a chief executive’s level of narcissism and his or her penchant for making frequent changes consistent with strategic dynamism.
The study used five indicators to measure a chief executive’s narcissism, including the prominence of the executive’s photographs in a company’s annual report, the frequency of the executive’s name in company news releases, the disparity between the chief executive’s compensation and that of the company’s second in command, and the frequency with which the chief executive uses first-person-singular pronouns in interviews.
For those keeping score, Mr. Kiernan’s e-mail to Darden trustees contains 19 first-person pronouns.
“They deliver much more extreme performance: big wins or big losses,” Mr. Hambrick says of narcissistic company leaders. “And if they are allowed to stay on the job, they tend to deliver big swings. It could bring about a lot of volatility.
“Having a narcissist for your CEO and engaging in strategic dynamism carries risk,” he continues. “It’s almost axiomatic that if you engage in strategic dynamism and take a big risk, you’re going to have extreme outcomes.”
There is no shortage of criticism that higher education moves too slowly, and there are plenty of trustees and pundits who would say a dose of strategic dynamism is just the kick in the pants the industry needs.
But how such a business approach would fit in a university setting is unclear. In the life of a college presidency, two years is often viewed as the amount of time an individual needs to assemble a team and begin executing an agenda. For many Virginia faculty, the idea that a verdict could be rendered on Ms. Sullivan’s presidency in just 24 months was anathema to the culture of the institution.
And how might a narcissistic proponent of strategic dynamism feel about shared governance?
“Not so hot,” says Andrew J. DuBrin, a professor emeritus of business at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “They would want more personal attention, playing a bigger role, even wanting a couple of buildings named after them.”
Mr. DuBrin is author of Narcissism in the Workplace: Research, Opinion, and Practice (Edward Elgar, 2012).
Mr. Kiernan’s theories on how strategic dynamism could be applied at Virginia are not fully fleshed out in his e-mail. He does note, however, that the board is “looking beyond incremental steps” to respond to financial challenges, which he says will be dealt with in a strategic-planning effort “with a focus on strategic dynamism.”
While he describes his role in Ms. Sullivan’s departure as “modest,” Mr. Kiernan says in the e-mail, which was sent the day Ms. Sullivan’s resignation was announced, that he was contacted “several weeks ago” by “two important Virginia alums” about working with Helen Dragas, rector of the board, on a “search process,” presumably for a new president.
If true, that would mean Mr. Kiernan had knowledge of Ms. Sullivan’s precarious status weeks before high-level administrators said they had a clue that the president’s job was in jeopardy.
“This Connecticut billionaire and a handful of other millionaires and billionaires have decided they know best, and they’ve essentially manipulated, if not usurped, the governing agenda of the University of Virginia,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the university.
Mr. Kiernan declined an interview request, as did Robert F. Bruner, dean of Virginia’s business school.
Power Struggle Over Finances
Mr. Kiernan’s e-mail prompts the question: How dynamic a president was Ms. Sullivan?
Ms. Sullivan’s signature effort over the last year was a reinvention of Virginia’s budgeting model, which she hoped would give deans more authority and accountability.
Known as responsibility center management, the model is based on the premise that individual academic units should keep the revenues they generate. Versions of the model are employed by a number of elite institutions, including Harvard University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Ms. Sullivan was provost before she came to Virginia.
Ms. Sullivan’s faculty supporters say her two-year tenure did not allow enough time to test the model, which is designed to promote creativity and entrepreneurship among departments that will benefit directly from money-making programs.
But the transition to the new model, which turns on its head a longstanding system that vested great power in the hands of a single chief operating officer, has created significant tensions between Ms. Sullivan’s two lieutenants, two administrators familiar with the inner workings of her cabinet said.
To great fanfare last year, Ms. Sullivan recruited the Johns Hopkins University’s chief operating officer and a Duke University vice provost to take similar positions at Virginia. But Michael Strine, executive vice president and chief operating officer, and John D. Simon, executive vice president and provost, are locked in a tense and continuing power struggle over who has the authority to steer university resources, said the administrative sources, who were given anonymity to describe internal matters.
The source of the tension between the two men “is as complicated as the story between Terry and the board,” one of the administrators said. Before Mr. Simon and Mr. Strine were hired, major resource-allocation decisions were centralized in the person of Leonard W. Sandridge, a Virginia veteran of four decades, who earned “Wizard of Oz” status as executive vice president and chief operating officer, the source said. Transitioning to a model where the provost theoretically has far greater discretion over resource allocation has not been easy, and both men Ms. Sullivan hired are advocating for more power in those discussions, the sources said.
Both sources also cited conversations with other administrators who reported that Mr. Strine took his complaints about the Sullivan administration directly to members of the Board of Visitors. Neither source, however, had direct knowledge of the conversations or the details of the concerns Mr. Strine may have expressed.
Mr. Simon and Mr. Strine both declined to comment. Ms. Sullivan, who appeared on a panel in Washington on Thursday, declined to answer questions from The Chronicle after the event.
Ms. Sullivan viewed Virginia’s budgeting system as a key vulnerability. In a May memo to Ms. Dragas, the rector, and Mark J. Kington, vice rector of the board, Ms. Sullivan said the highly centralized model of decision making that Virginia had used for decades “does not promote academic excellence,” hardens silos, and frustrates innovation.
The board has implied Ms. Sullivan was insufficiently attuned to the urgency of the fiscal challenges and competitive threats facing the institution, but the 12-page memo is blunt in its assessment that Virginia is not as strong an institution as many believe.
“In a number of critical areas we are reputed to be better than we actually are,” Ms. Sullivan wrote in the memo, which was first reported on by The Washington Post and provided to The Chronicle this week.
Ms. Sullivan went on to describe the top-10 status of some of the university’s schools as “fragile” because they depend on a few faculty who could be poached by other institutions. To counter those trends, she suggested greater emphasis on hiring top faculty, who would be focused on teaching upper-level undergraduate courses as more introductory courses are provided in “hybrid” online formats.
The vision Ms. Sullivan laid out clearly left the board wanting. On June 8, Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington walked into Ms. Sullivan’s office and told her they had the votes to dismiss her, a source with knowledge of the meeting said.
Their message came down to this, the source said: “You’re a good president, but we need great.”
Correction (6/15/2012, 7:48 a.m.): This article originally misstated the titles of three University of Virginia employees. Michael Strine is executive vice president, not vice president for finance. John D. Simon, executive vice president and provost, previously served as vice provost, not provost, at Duke University. And Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies and law, not an associate professor. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
