In regard to the continuing tragedy of The University of Virginia, Terry Newell has praised President Sullivan’s leadership in the Huffington Post lately but has also suggested that Sullivan may have been less effective in managing up than she was in working with faculty, students, and other administrators.

She expressed total surprise at her ouster, which either shows that the board was deceptive as well as secretive in their communication with her over the past two years or that she missed important signals and the need to manage up, not just down, in the university hierarchy.

Newell suggests as well that Sullivan “may have neglected building the external bridges she needed to sustain her program of change,” and that “most political leaders in the state have stayed on the sidelines since her ouster” as a consequence.

Perhaps—but it seems undeniable from the reporting I have read that the board’s secretive behavior was intentionally deceptive and that board members who participated deliberately kept Sullivan in the dark until they were assured of enough votes to force her resignation. That they confronted her without a formal meeting or even a poll of the entire board indicates bad faith to me. And Rector Dragas’s formal statement about the matter, intended I suppose to declare that the cabal’s intentions were honorable, simply doesn’t ring true.

Nor does Dragas’s claim that she and her board colleagues did the right thing in the wrong way. It’s not possible to separate the board’s action (and the “deliberations” revealed in the email correspondence that has been unearthed) from their manner of proceding. This is not a case where action and process are separable, and the action was a violation of the board’s frundamental responsibility to the institution it is charged with governing. If one seeks a reason for President Sullivan’s “surprise,” one need look no further than this fact, it seems to me.

Many commentators have pointed out that the firing of President Sullivan proceded according to a script that is commonplace in the corporate world. If this true, it ought not to be; though one must acknowledge that in times when cutthroat capitalism is popular, as it is today, profit is taken to justify all sorts of human abuse. But the principle involved here is the fundamental assurance that every member of a university community is entitled to take for granted, of equal membership in the community and due process if that membership must be challenged or qualified. This assurance is built into the university community’s fundamental “mode of self-presentation,” to borrow a phrase from Stanley Fish, and it is in no way abridged by that community’s various hierarchical arrangements.¹

Without this principle students would have no reasonable expectation of fairness in grading, and faculty (tenured or not) and administrators would have no reasonable expectation of the fairness of peer review, nor could they be required to do their jobs any more than students could be required to perform assignments. The entire system, in which reasons are given for actions and evidence provided for judgments and conclusions taken, would turn out to be based on something no more substantial than whim.

Rector Dragas’s list of challenges she contends face the University of Virginia (and her claim that these challenges justify her cabal’s acting to fire a president they did not believe up facing them) is in no way original. In fact it could have been cribbed from University Administration for Dummies, if such a manual existed, since the same or similar challenges face all but the most prestigious private institutions nowadays.² I’ve noted with relief that the cabal’s interim president designate, Dean Carl P. Zeithaml, has removed himself from consideration for the present and stated that he is opposed to the firing of President Sullivan.

Zeithaml’s action is appropriate and commendable in light of the fact that the UVA board will now meet to consider reinstating the president as requested by all other university deans, the faculty, and most students. It is also at least interesting that Governor McDonnell of Virginia, for whom I don’t have a great deal of respect, has given the UVA board an ultimatim, resolve the leadership crisis or be removed for cause. I expect he just wants the whole thing to go away, and since reinstating Sullivan seems to offer the only resolution acceptable to the university community, I am expecting the board to offer to reinstate her.

Interesting, too, that we now have reached that inevitable point when the story becomes the news. Apparently we’re all appealing to Mr. Jefferson, on all sides of this.

Notes

¹I am borrowing a phrase from something Professor Fish says in a different context and do not mean to claim that he would agree. The idea, itself, may be traceable to Jeremy Waldron, whose book Fish reviews in the piece I cite; though ultimately I think it comes from Kant.
²One might compare a list of recommendations “made for institutions, presidents and governing boards” by a group of former university and college presidents. Valerie Strauss lists them here.

This photo heads a piece that’s been in the news for a few days. It shows the columns of the historic Rotunda at the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson, with the word greed spray-painted on them. University officials have painted over the letters and hired an expensive PR firm to help Rector Helen Dragas and the board members who supported her star-chamber ouster of UVA’s President, Teresa Sullivan, weather the storm of criticism that has engulfed them. A Google search just now unearthed over 1500 news articles and opinion pieces about the matter.

Today’s Washington Post carries a fine piece by Valerie Strauss about UVA’s present horror. Strauss quite rightly points out that the removal of President Sullivan “reflect[s] the way school reform at all levels has been carried out in recent years in some important ways.” Strauss’s painstaking comparison of events reported to have taken place at UVA and the now familiar scenario of “reform” that continues to be imposed on educational institutions of all sorts by venal legislative bodies and corporate boards and abusive, tyrannical administrators is telling, as is her point that the UVA board’s appointment of “Carl P. Zeithaml, dean of U-Va.’s highly regarded McIntire School of Commerce” should be taken very seriously as an indication of the direction Rector Dragas wishes to chart at Charlottesville.

At the center of the modern school reform movement is the philosophy that public schools should be treated not as civic institutions but rather as corporate entities. That the interim leader is Zeithaml, whose speciality is in the field of “strategic management” speaks volumes about the direction the board wants the school to go.

I take Strauss’s analysis a step further, for it seems to me that the emerging philosophy of higher education on display at many of our nation’s flagship universities regards these institutions as mere brands to be bought and sold like companies ripe for takeover. It’s a sad affair when a corporate vandal is able to leverage the purchase of an American institution like Anheuser Busch here in St. Louis, deplete its workforce, destroy its corporate culture, destabilize its philanthropy, and generally turn what was a sustainable enterprise and something of a model of corporate good citizenship into a mere profit center, only because, as he declared when he came to town, corporate vandal Carlos Brito wanted the Anheuser Busch brand. That’s a sad affair. But when the same logic is applied to a great public treasure such as the University of Virginia, that’s criminal. And of course school reform is being pursued according to a similar logic, taking us back to the discredited idea of the factory school.

Strauss points out as well that “education reform” has been a goal of “the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators,” who have “worked in secret for years to promote privatization and corporate interests in education and other areas of American society.” The corruption of university research by corporate money is an open scandal. It’s now common practice for the giants of corporate chemistry to produce “studies” favorable to their own marketing strategies and seek vulnerable faculty to sign their names as researchers. And undergraduate education is going the way of the public school. Faculties are being scapegoated just as public school teachers are. Mindless sets of “assessment” instruments are being imposed on them and upon their students by entities outside education who now find themselves able to demand “accountability” from them. Academic tenure is being undermined in all venues, but of course tenure has never protected faculty from the most egregious actions of administrators and boards of directors.

Thomas Jefferson regarded the founding of The University of Virginia as one of his highest achievements, second only to the composition of The Declaration of Independence. It is hard to imagine that Jefferson would approve what is presently happening in the shadow of his Rotunda.