The Chronicle asked several higher-education administrators, scholars, and observers to comment on the sudden resignation of President Teresa A. Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, under pressure from its Board of Visitors. Here are excerpts from their responses.
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus, George Washington University
In the firing of President Sullivan, the three-person cabal of the governing board of the University of Virginia acted capriciously and to the detriment of the institution they purport to serve. Their initiative diminishes the code of honor by which Mr. Jefferson’s university has been defined since its founding. The legacy of UVa demands more, demands better. One must ask: Where was the rest of the board, and who speaks for the University of Virginia?
The American university is as splendid as it is in part due to the great contributions of wisdom, work, and wealth of volunteer trustees and regents. Their autonomy has usually, but not always, protected the academy from external excess and political intervention. Trustees’ independence, however, comes with a responsibility for prudence informed by fiduciary protocols and commitment to the academic social contract.
Without accountability, anything is possible. We see in the case of the University of Virginia that too much of a good thing is an invitation to arbitrary, impulsive initiative. A balance must always be sought that supports academic freedom, consultative governance, transparency, and collegiality along with accountability.
Universities are communities composed of numerous stakeholders, all of whose voices should be reflected in decision making. Leadership calls for relentless consultation, the balancing of goals, of conflicting ambitions and agendas along with contrasting, often antithetical, priorities. Choices are inevitable. Presidents, faculty, and boards must find common ground, especially in difficult financial circumstances. A unilateral act by one part of the triumvirate (as is the situation at UVa) diminishes not only the power structure but also the soundness of the institution.
Many trustees are appointed because of their professional standing, financial wherewithal, and/or political connections. At state colleges and universities, the political ties may trump other characteristics. But that should not deter a trustee’s ability to rise above partisanship for the good of academic rigor, stability, and excellence.
Presidents understand that trustees have the right to hire and fire. Trustees must understand that if they hire or fire without due cause and due process, transparency, prudence, and soundness, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to hire the next president.
Timothy Burke, professor of history, Swarthmore College
What has happened in recent days at the University of Virginia has happened to many less famous public universities in the past decade. But at Virginia, it’s been done far more incompetently.
It offends me to hear this kind of move as “running a university more like a business.” No well-run business would survive a board of directors who insisted on capriciously micromanaging individual units of the company. A business that made “flunky” the first qualification for its CEO would find it difficult to recruit talented leadership. A board that took no interest in retaining its best employees would survive only as a bottom feeder. A business that offended its customers and strangled an important revenue stream like alumni donations would be out of business. Let’s not dignify this kind of mismanagement by implying that it is as coherent as “running like a business.”
This is less a management approach than a move to take the business of the public behind closed doors, to fence off the commons. An extraordinary action—firing a recently hired, highly skilled, well-liked president—requires extraordinary justification to every possible public: the citizens of Virginia, the alumni of the university, the faculty and staff, the wider world of academe. No such justification has been offered.
President Sullivan’s statement gives hints of the board’s thinking. Reports suggest they wanted her to cut entire departments and programs quickly. She describes herself instead as an incrementalist, seeking “sustained change with buy-in.” That’s how you govern if you’re in it for the long term, fulfilling your duty to a centuries-old institution.
The public-relations firm hired by the board will very likely try to make this a public plebiscite on a caricatured description of individual departments, with a heavy seasoning of anti-intellectualism.
This is not about single programs but about the liberal-arts ideal as a whole. The liberal arts can be responsive to fiscal pressures and hard choices. Faculty and administrators everywhere need to demonstrate that flexibility and adaptability. At many institutions, including the University of Virginia, they have. They’re the ones to carry Jefferson’s legacy forward.
Strategic dynamists who want a fly-by-night, profit-driven vocational school with online courses should start their own university rather than steal one.
Rita Bornstein, president emerita, professor of philanthropy and leadership development, Rollins College
Without question, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors has the authority to separate the president from her position. However, in higher education, the tradition of shared governance is virtually sacred, especially to the faculty. In this situation, it appears that faculty were not consulted or prepared. This action seems arbitrary at a university that considers itself a “community of trust.”
The board’s decision reflects three trends affecting higher education. First is the tendency toward hasty responses to new financial pressures. Second is the declining role of the faculty in institutional governance. And third is a diminishing commitment to the liberal arts. The UVa situation provides a case study in understanding how these trends can undermine our traditions.
Most institutional leaders today are rethinking their financial model and attempting to cut costs while containing tuition increases. Some of those efforts are at the expense of the curriculum and the student experience. Such results may be mitigated by involving faculty in the financial decision-making process.
Apparently the action to fire Sullivan, in part for her approach to managing financial stringency, took the president and the faculty by surprise. Two years is an insufficient period of time for a president to chart a new course and implement her vision. Sullivan followed an immensely successful longtime president and, it can be argued, should have been given at least three to five years to establish her own style and authority.
In the current stressful environment for higher education, this situation will have a chilling effect on presidents, faculties, and boards. The institutional memory of this event will hang like a dark cloud over the image and reputation of the University of Virginia. And, of significance to all of higher education, this unfortunate situation weakens the democratic tradition of shared governance in all our institutions. Boards need to recognize that, despite today’s financial pressures, corporate-style, top-down leadership violates the culture of higher education and does not work.
Judith Burstyn, former chair, University Committee (executive committee of the Faculty Senate), University of Wisconsin at Madison
The unilateral decision to remove a sitting university president, in the midst of a summer weekend no less, is unprecedented. Despite objections to the firing of President Sullivan by faculty and student leadership, including a vote of no confidence in the board itself by the Faculty Senate, the board continued its takeover. Acting like a cabal of thieves, the members met late into the night, emerging with an egregious decision to replace Sullivan, a sociologist of work, with an interim president: Carl Zeithaml, F.S. Cornell Professor in Free Enterprise and dean of the McIntire School of Commerce.
This action is inimical to trustees’ responsibility as the governing board of a university. In the words of Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities and a former president of Cornell University, “This is the most egregious case I have ever seen of mismanagement by a governing board.”
It is far easier to lose stature as a great university than it is to gain it. Wise university leaders understand this, and they bring change to their institutions through steady and deliberate engagement of faculty, staff, and students.
This was precisely the type of leadership that President Sullivan appeared to be providing. Meaningful participation by stakeholders in institutional governance is a hallmark of universities that are the most productive in terms of scholarship, and where faculty are most likely to happily reside throughout their careers. The courageous opposition to the Board of Visitors by the UVa Faculty Senate and its executive committee, and by the Student Council and its leadership, speaks of an institution where shared governance is valued and appreciated.
The actions at UVa leave great cause for concern. As Michael Bastedo, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has written, governing boards are increasingly embedded in money and politics, engaging in self-interested decision-making. They tell us “it’s for your own good” in an attempt at moral seduction and a desire to appear ethical. Intelligent communities like those at UVa and Madison do not buy this. And they shouldn’t, if they are to remain public institutions we can all respect.
Robert M. O’Neil, former president, University of Virginia, and founding director of the university’s Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
Mr. Jefferson’s university is a singular place in myriad ways that are often overlooked or slighted. For example, few of us recall that this was the first truly secular institution in the country—for that matter, in the world—because its founder uniquely appreciated the delicate balance between church and state. We also often slight such crucial elements as the first and, even today, the most committed student-led honor system, of which students and faculty remain justifiably proud. Most of all, we revere a long and deep tradition of shared governance among the academic leadership (exemplified by Terry Sullivan’s splendid, regrettably brief tenure), the faculty, and, of course, save for a tragic lapse last week, the Board of Visitors (of which Mr. Jefferson was the initial leader, followed by Messrs. Madison and Monroe). What now seems imperative is a healing process, in which the appointment of Carl Zeithaml represents a vital first step. The next step must be a wholly credible search process, fully involving faculty, students, alumni, and community. My fond hope is that few faculty and students would now wish to leave this remarkable academic community, since they all joined it for the best of reasons and remain wholly committed to its noblest values.
Peter Wood, president, National Association of Scholars
Teresa Sullivan’s forced resignation from the presidency of the University of Virginia is, at the moment, murky. Helen Dragas, rector of the UVa Board of Visitors, has offered rather opaque reasons for the dismissal. At a meeting with vice presidents and deans, Dragas cited three reasons, as paraphrased by The Chronicle:
- the need for a leader who would be open to changes in curriculum-delivery methods, including online learning;
- the need to make difficult decisions about reallocating financial resources across the university;
- a pressing need to hire faculty in the wake of an anticipated wave of retirements.
Although some observers have postulated ulterior motives, Dragas’s explanation should probably be taken at close to face value. It speaks, as she herself put it, to a “philosophical difference of opinion” about how a university—or at least that particular university—should be run.
Sullivan’s firing might best be seen as a foreshock of the collapsing higher-education bubble. The rightful role of a governing board is to foresee major shifts in the conditions that their institutions face. I cannot speak to how well Dragas or other members of the UVa board have anticipated the future, but their attempts to anticipate are legitimate, as is their readiness to confer with strategic business minds who have anticipated deep changes in the economy.
Sullivan may well have been doing excellent work as UVa’s president, but even her strongest defenders depict her as committed to maintaining the university in something as close as possible to its current form. That’s an ideal I admire. But that doesn’t mean that the Board of Visitors acted inappropriately. Because Dragas sometimes speaks in the platitudinous and imprecise language of managementese, more finely spoken members of the faculty tend to dismiss her as a barbarian from the land of unfettered capitalism who does not understand what higher education is all about.
Such condescension may be misplaced. The question is: How real are the perils that UVa and other high-end state universities face? On that the jury is still out, but there is surely a strong case that the perils are great, and that the UVa board acted within its legitimate role to replace the chief executive with someone more committed to its priorities.
Cathy N. Davidson, co-director, Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge; professor of English and interdisciplinary studies; and former vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, Duke University
According to a university Web site, the University of Virginia is expected to receive only 5.8 percent of its revenue from state funds in the 2012-13 academic year. That amount is down from 26 percent in 1989-90. Virginia, like many states, is declining to support its state-university system yet seems determined to control it to a degree that, so far as I can tell, is unprecedented. A state Board of Visitors has used secret meetings, conducted barely within the bounds of its own rules, to oust a president chosen just two years ago.
Minimum state support but maximum state control? What’s wrong with this picture?
The first research university in the United States was Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, conceived explicitly to meet the need for field-specific expertise in the new industrial economy. Since then the silos of the university have become fortresses, the methods of accreditation and assessment ossified, even as we live in a world of work where change is global and instant. We need to reconceive of all education, K-lifelong, for our new interactive, global, digital world, where context and communication are at least as central to the future of our students as specialized content is.
Yet to think you can make such change by ousting a president overnight, while leaving other university structures and personnel intact, is to embrace regime change rather than motivated, strategic innovation. The Godzilla approach wreaks havoc within a great institution without a game plan for repairing the damage or a vision of what the resurrected university will look like. I hope that wiser, more creative minds will prevail at UVa and restore both people and process, so that successful educational innovation has a chance.
Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University
I know nothing about the reasons for, or the merit of, President Sullivan’s ouster. But I have two observations, relating to university governance and the length of governing-board terms.
Regarding governance, I think the Faculty Senate’s reaction shows confusion about who runs the university. Legally, the faculty work for the board, not vice versa. But the faculty don’t consider the trustees their bosses. That demonstrates a major problem: a murky conception of property rights and governance. The faculty believe that, since they do all the teaching and research, they are the university, and administrators are just support personnel. Sometimes the administration thinks it is the university; at other times the governor, legislature, or the alumni think the same.
In such a situation, universities move to a “shared governance” model that is inefficient, rather non-innovative, and confusing. The UVa story reflects that reality. Whether the Board of Visitors acted appropriately, I don’t know, but I do think that universities require oversight from the outsiders that provide vast portions of their support.
The boards of Virginia public universities are selected by the governor. But the board members’ terms are only four years, and the governor also is constitutionally limited to one four-year term. Therefore no person can be reappointed by the same governor. Since governors want their own people, reappointments are probably fairly unusual. Thus, about one-fourth of the board, on average, is replaced every year.
Hence a 2009 board can pick a president that accepts the goals of board members, but three years later a new board might have radically different goals for the institution, and thus favor changes in leadership, even though the president had met the goals agreed upon during the initial hiring. There is too much turnover for efficient governance.
The broader issue is: What is the board’s role in university governance?
Andrew Delbanco, professor of American studies at Columbia University and author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012)
No outsider can know the specifics of what drove the dismissal of President Sullivan. What’s clear is that this sorry story is a wake-up call for higher education, in which tensions are rising everywhere over the increasing gap between resources and needs. Pressure to invest in potentially profitable projects such as “distance learning” while cutting “dispensable” programs such as low-enrollment majors will inevitably inflame the generic tension between boards and management, as well as between management and faculty.
At UVa, the former tension seems to have mitigated the latter, since the board was reckless in undercutting the president without preparing the community or, evidently, the president herself. It was both commendable and predictable that faculty would rally to her support. At private universities, where boards tend to fill up over time with presidential cronies, recklessness can take the opposite form, as trustees stick with a president too long.
Despite the dangers illustrated by the UVa case, academic boards will have to become more active in our era of chronic crisis. They must become more than decorative bodies or fund-raising instruments. Given the potential hazards, it’s imperative that board members educate themselves earnestly and urgently about the culture of the institutions for which they are responsible. They need to listen to and learn from all constituencies: not just senior administrators but also faculty, staff, students, alumni, and neighboring communities. They must recognize that board service has (or should) become very nearly a full-time job. (Every board member should read Judge José A. Cabranes’s “Myth and Reality of University Trusteeship in the Post-Enron Era.”
With all universities facing tough choices, the distinction between long-term direction (once the province of the board) and short-term management (once the job of administrators) is becoming murky. The institutions that get through the coming storm in the best shape will be those where a spirit of collaboration prevails from top to bottom—indeed, where the very idea of top versus bottom is rejected as a path to self-destruction.
Marc Bousquet, associate professor of English, Santa Clara University
What should we make of the hullabaloo surrounding Teresa A. Sullivan’s ouster by an activist board of trustees (“Visitors” in UVa-speak)? Thousands of students, faculty, and staff have turned out in person or written comments in support of the president. At least one board member and one tenured professor have resigned in protest. Smart, thoughtful people like Siva Vaidhyanathan and Bethany Nowviskie have weighed in. But what are they hoping to gain by these demonstrations? With Sullivan’s replacement already appointed, it isn’t likely to be her reinstallation. Nonetheless, they might be agitating in support of Sullivan’s vision—for the board to replace her with someone like her, or at least with her values.
Which raises a reasonable question: Is that enough?
Unquestionably, Sullivan was less bad for faculty than many possible alternatives envisioned by the Republican appointees to the board and the board’s chair (“rector”), Helen Dragas, a real-estate developer. By all accounts, Dragas and a majority of the board wanted fast corporate restructuring of the curriculum and resource management, of the sort signaled by their pick for interim president, Carl P. Zeithaml, dean of the UVa School of Commerce. By contrast, Sullivan styled herself an incrementalist who sought “sustained change with buy-in,” as she put it. Her academic background, in the sociology of work, helped her to gain the trust of faculty.
But She hardly comes off as a visionary reclaiming the university from corporate domination. To the contrary, she embraced principles of lean academic production.
Sullivan’s departure raises bigger questions for Virginia’s faculty and for the rest of us. Among them: What do we expect from leadership? The answer depends on what we expect from ourselves. Those of us with an active relationship to organizational change—I mean democratic organizational change, from below, like unionists or members of an activist AAUP chapter—tend to have lower expectations of leadership. We understand that our leaders are only as good as we allow them to be.
The energy and emotion being spent on the fate of a highly compensated, largely conventional executive would be better spent in building an organized faculty voice.
Sure, a lot of bad things could happen to UVa’s faculty now. But one of the worst might be “winning” this battle and getting back Sullivan, or someone like her.
Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow, Century Foundation
The arrogant dismissal of President Teresa Sullivan by wealthy alumni on the Board of Visitors has struck a chord among educators nationally who are fed up with people who have had material success in life believing they know best how to run schools.
First came the Wall Street hedge-fund managers who supported privately run charter schools in the belief that if they could only get rid of unions—those pesky institutions that give teachers a say in how schools are run—then stubborn obstacles to academic success, such as poverty and segregation, could be vanquished.
Now come the Virginia Beach developer Helen E. Dragas, who sits as rector, and the hedge-fund billionaire Peter D. Kiernan, engineering the ouster of Sullivan, who has been in the job for just two years and was widely viewed as successful. Kiernan, author of a book called Becoming China’s Bitch, bragged in an e-mail message that he helped remove Sullivan for failing to employ “strategic dynamism.”
The Board of Visitors, so blinded by its own hubris, did not even deign to explain to the public precisely why Sullivan had been dismissed.
The culture of entitlement among the wealthy grows when great public institutions are starved for funding and have to resort increasingly to private support, as has UVa. It is an especially big granter of legacy preferences to the offspring of wealthy alumni. Once you give wealthy alumni special access to public institutions, it’s only a matter of time before they arrogate to themselves important decisions.
Members of UVa’s wealthy board are appointed by democratically elected governors, but as the UVa faculty member Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in Slate, rich individuals in the past had a better sense of their own limits. Robber barons like Leland Stanford, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller provided financial support for universities but didn’t micromanage them, because they “knew what they didn’t know.”
In our new gilded age, the Board of Visitors would do well to enroll in a classics seminar. “Understanding the classics is fundamental to being effective and exercising the public trust,” John Casteen III, Sullivan’s predecessor as president, pointedly commented. “The king drives himself to disaster because he is subject to the whims of hubris.”