As the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors gathered in the historic Rotunda last Tuesday, Helen E. Dragas betrayed little emotion. The rector of the board, who had come to be viewed as the architect of Teresa A. Sullivan’s ouster from the university’s presidency, politely smiled as her colleagues voted one by one to reverse course and reinstate the leader.
When it came time for Ms. Dragas to join the unanimous vote, she did so with an “unequivocal yes.”
Ms. Dragas’s vote was a complete turnaround. She had spent days refusing, then attempting, to explain why Ms. Sullivan, a respected academic with just two years on the job, had to pack her things and get the heck out of Carr’s Hill, the grand white-columned home that Ms. Sullivan and her seven predecessors in the Virginia presidency have inhabited since 1909.
Now here was the rector suggesting after weeks of turmoil that the best thing for her alma mater was to put the whole episode behind them and call off Ms. Sullivan’s moving van.
For a moment, as the reinstatement vote neared, everyone seemed to be playing a scripted part. Sporting a coral-colored blazer, Ms. Dragas, a Virginia Beach-area developer and the daughter of Greek immigrants, seemed determined to soften the Gordon Gekko-in-heels image she had earned over the previous fortnight. Indeed, by the time this was over, she would become a woman who hugs. She heartily embraced Ms. Sullivan and shook hands with the very faculty leaders who had been calling for her to resign.
For her part, Ms. Sullivan, with her owlish visage and round spectacles, had the look of a seasoned “incrementalist,” whose return to the presidency was the only true pathway for restoring the natural of order of things not only at Virginia, but also in the broader landscape of public higher education.
So how did we get here? How did the story of one president’s forced resignation and subsequent reinstatement come to capture the attention of a nation? Respected as she is, it is difficult to imagine Ms. Sullivan alone stirring up such a ruckus.
At the heart of the power struggle between Ms. Sullivan and the board was a debate that struck a broader chord, one about how quickly a historic institution like the University of Virginia can or should transform itself. That tension, played out warts and all at a premier public university, captivated faculty, administrators, and trustees across the country, many of whom saw their own fears about the future of teaching and research reflected in what soon became a resurrection tale, with shades of a soap opera and a morality play.
Pressures on university finances, the potentials and perils of online education, and a realization that colleges may need to radically change the way they do business are all embedded in the story of Virginia, and they have become part of the story of higher education itself.
Got a Revolution
There’s this thing called the Internet. It’s going to change our lives.
Such is the sentiment that college governing-board members around the nation have heard at almost every higher-education conference held from coast to coast for at least five years. Hyped up on caffeine and pastries, trustees cram into tidy hotel ballrooms and talk about the transformational power of technology to change the way students learn. A lot of them are also pretty sure there is money to be saved here.
With all of that talk, it is easy to see why board members at colleges without a robust plan for the role of online learning at their institutions are getting restless and even scared. This certainly seemed to be the case for Ms. Dragas.
In frequent e-mail exchanges with Mark J. Kington, who resigned as vice rector of the board amid the controversy over Ms. Sullivan’s ouster, Ms. Dragas sent links to news stories about innovations in online education. A Wall Street Journal article, for instance, discussed “higher education’s online revolution,” citing as an example the open-courseware partnership between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Good piece in WSJ today—why we can’t afford to wait,” Ms. Dragas’s subject line read.
To the extent that the rector has explained her dissatisfaction with the president, she has pointed to what she says is Ms. Sullivan’s lack of a coherent strategy for establishing an online presence as one factor. But many faculty view Ms. Dragas’s assessment of what is happening at Harvard and MIT as misguided.
If she were truly concerned about the diminution of state resources, and about how the university might respond to that reality, looking to free courses offered by the Ivy League is probably not the answer, says George Siemens, a pioneer of huge open online courses, or MOOC’s.
“What’s happening with these open online courses isn’t about cost cutting,” says Mr. Siemens, associate director of Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, in Canada. “It’s about staying relevant.”
Mr. Siemens likens the Harvard-MIT project, known as edX, to Google’s decision to develop a cellphone. At first the Android was not a worthy competitor of the iPhone, he says, but rather an attempt by Google to get a foothold in the cellphone market before Apple completely gobbled it up.
Universities that develop open courseware, he says, are planting a flag, not changing their economic models.
While there is nothing wrong with a university’s making moves to stay relevant and cutting-edge, there is a danger if board members wrongly view online education as an answer to all of their problems, says Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities.
Online “has become something of a buzzword now,” says Mr. Rawlings, who previously served as president of the University of Iowa and of Cornell University. “There’s a lot of naïveté about online education in a lot of the comments I’ve seen in the last few weeks. It’s not as if this was invented last week.”
There are useful applications of online technology, he adds, but “there are others that are put forward as panaceas and clearly are not panaceas.”
Corporate Influences
Of all the supporting characters in Virginia’s drama, Peter D. Kiernan’s cameo is among the most memorable, and perhaps the most significant in the broad themes of the story.
In an e-mail to his fellow board members of the foundation for Virginia’s Darden School of Business, the venture capitalist and alumnus was among the first to signal that Ms. Sullivan’s ouster represented a victory for corporate-style change agents, and a defeat for flat-footed academics and their consultative processes.
“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. “These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning.”
Mr. Kiernan, facing criticism for his stated role in the “project” to remove Ms. Sullivan, soon resigned from his position as a member and chair of the business-school foundation’s Board of Trustees. But his e-mail made clear that he and members of the Board of Visitors had engaged in private conversations about quickly changing the university’s online presence without a strategic plan.
The secrecy of the deliberations, which had significant implications for UVa’s future, was central to the broad-based critique of the university’s board.
James S. Gilmore III, who was Virginia’s governor from 1998 to 2002, says the board might well have avoided such a backlash if members had publicly articulated their concerns. Instead they hashed out their differences with Ms. Sullivan “in the dead of night.”
“To keep all this under the table, engage in secret discussions, including with nonmembers of the board, and to hold a meeting on a Sunday afternoon and fire the president without warning, is inappropriate, and it was begging for this kind of outcome,” says Mr. Gilmore, a UVa alumnus.
The move toward “strategic dynamism” that Mr. Kiernan recommended implied that the university ought to function like an agile corporation, changing its strategy quickly to make a play in emerging markets. That approach would differ starkly from the one employed by other universities considered leaders in institutional transformation.
At the University System of Maryland, for instance, professors have spent the past five years meticulously redesigning courses, often using technology to accommodate ever-larger undergraduate class sections. The guiding principle of “first do no harm” is central to Maryland’s project, which greenlights a course only after a pilot program demonstrates that students perform as well or better in the new format.
Some of Maryland’s course redesigns have demonstrated significant cost reductions, but improved learning outcomes have always been the central goal, says William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the Maryland system.
“It all sounds good: We’re going to use technology and take costs out,” he says. “But you’re tampering with something very important, and that is the quality of education young people are receiving.”
Maryland has redesigned about 40 lower-division courses, which now serve about 12,000 students, or 10 percent of the system’s enrollment The process would have been impossible without broad-based buy-in from faculty, which has taken several years to develop, Mr. Kirwan says.
“It was a matter of having a very intentional and persistent effort to engage more and more faculty in this effort without making it seem like it was a top-down mandate, which would never have worked,” he says.
And yet a “top down” mandate is exactly what Ms. Sullivan says board members were advocating in Virginia.
Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the National Association of System Heads, says the Virginia board’s approach was all the more puzzling in the face of clear examples that change happens most effectively on campuses where a broad dialogue first occurs. By trying to skip that step, she says, the board has set the timetable back.
“Six months isn’t going to kill the University of Virginia,” says Ms. Wellman, an expert on college cost structures. “That would have allowed them to do the math and figure out where there’s smoke and where there’s not. If they were worried about creating opposition to change, they couldn’t have done it more forcefully than the way they did it.”
Awakened Establishment
What made it clear that Virginia’s story was different was not just the sustained and organized pushback from faculty, students, and alumni, but also the unequivocal condemnation of the board from the sometimes-reticent higher-education establishment. As the days drew on, and the details of Ms. Sullivan’s ouster were revealed, there was a sense that college and university elders were simply unwilling to sit quietly as one of their own was sent packing.
In short order, the leaders of three higher-education organizations—the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards—readily told reporters that the Virginia board’s action constituted a miscarriage of justice. Even the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Virginia’s accreditor, chimed in with the suggestion that the university’s core principles, including “integrity,” had been violated.
Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, says the vocal condemnation of Virginia’s board very likely reflects fatigue from “the accumulation of occasions over the course of recent months” when high-profile presidents resigned, were fired, or appeared to have powerful forces rallying against them. She suggests that presidents of public institutions now often find themselves at odds with board members who come into their positions with political or personal agendas, and “see the institution as an instrument for accomplishing that agenda.”
There has been no shortage of presidents who have hit political buzz saws within the past two years. After running afoul of system-level bosses, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin left the University of Wisconsin at Madison to lead a private liberal-arts college, Amherst, and Richard W. Lariviere was fired from the University of Oregon. He will lead Chicago’s Field Museum. William C. (Bill) Powers, president of the University of Texas at Austin, also appeared on the ropes in May over his opposition to a tuition freeze.
“What we’re seeing is, the rapidity of the change creates challenges for campuses,” Mr. Powers says. “It creates challenges for boards, challenges for families. It’s not surprising there’s some stress.”
But Ms. Broad sees a real danger in that stress. It might drum strong leaders out of jobs, she says, or discourage them from pursuing presidencies in the first place.
“When the gems in American higher education become tarnished, the whole system of higher education suffers,” she says. “The pride that is felt in the academy of having the world’s finest universities is a pride that engages and motivates all of us. It has been created over decades and decades of hard work.”
It was that sense of collective decades of work, and even the weight of those years, that Ms. Sullivan seemed to refer to as she spoke on UVa’s historic Lawn about what those tumultuous two weeks in June meant for her and the university.
“I am not good enough, or wise enough, or strong enough to do everything that needs doing at UVa on my own,” she said after the board had reinstated her. “But you have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am not alone.”
