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.