After President Teresa Sullivan’s resignation on June 10, alumni wrote more than 6,000 emails, letters and comments to the Alumni Association expressing their concerns about the University.
A printout of an Excel document containing nearly 6,000 alumni responses the Alumni Association received prior to June 21 Many of the responses came after a June 15 email from the Alumni Association invited comments that would be gathered through an online form and shared with the Board of Visitors. Alumni also expressed themselves with comments on the U.Va. Magazine website. On June 22, the Alumni Association printed them all and presented them to the Board of Visitors, four days before the Board voted to reinstate Sullivan.
What did alumni have to say? Virginia Magazine compiled statistics from the letters and comments in an effort to better understand alumni opinion.
“Far and away, the largest concern that alumni had was the perceived process undertaken by the Board in the decision and execution of the resignation. More than 60 percent of the responses we received highlighted this as a problem,” says Alumni Association President Tom Faulders.
Only about 5 percent of respondents supported the Board's actions.
Twenty percent of the sample stated that they felt they didn’t have enough information to shape an informed opinion about the Board’s actions and only 5 percent of sample included statements that supported the Board’s actions. Eugene Bogen (Col ’65) wrote, “None of us has sufficient information to approve or condemn the action taken by the executive committee of the Board of Visitors, because of the lack of a clearly worded statement in plain English explaining the reasons for President Sullivan’s dismissal.”
Approximately 31 percent of the letters mentioned a fear that U.Va.’s reputation had been tarnished, and 25 percent of the respondents explicitly stated that President Sullivan should be reinstated. This number increased over the 17 days before Sullivan’s actual reinstatement.
Alumni Association President Tom Faulders and Director of New Media Brittany Averette walk across Grounds to the Board of Visitors office to deliver alumni feedback.
Annie Mountcastle (Col ’08) wrote an email that expressed how she believed Sullivan’s ouster should be reconsidered by the Board. She writes:
“I spent a year working in restorative justice with first-time juvenile offenders. The experience reinforced for me the knowledge that we all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are big, sometimes monumental, but that doesn't mean we can't stop, be still and try to repair what we have broken. I recognize and appreciate that you all are working hard to repair the harm that your actions have caused, but that is impossible without full engagement of the community that has been harmed. Your apparent disregard of the Faculty Senate's specific requests is alarming, at best.”
Ben Gaston (Col ’79), who is also a faculty member in the U.Va. Medical School, likened the relationship between the Board and the University to the relationship between venture capitalists and academics in a biomedical startup company. He writes:
“… Boards commonly misunderstand the innovation, the real value and the appropriate market involved in the intellectual property they license. Based on these misunderstandings, they hire consultants or appoint other Board members who also fail to understand the product. They then take the company in the wrong direction; and they blame the product when things go badly. I have seen this scenario play out more than once. Everyone loses.
… it is an interesting experiment that the Rector has begun. She will test the hypotheses that 1) people with experience in capital management are the best qualified to establish the course for an academic institution; and 2) this course is best charted without any input or wisdom from the scholars who are being managed.
The problems with the experiment are as follows. First, the Rector did not get any of the participants’ consent to enroll the institution in this experiment … [and] the model in which venture capitalists tell academics what is best for them—with only a token, patronizing dialogue—almost always fails.”
Some supported the Board’s actions. DSmith left a comment on the Virginia Magazine website that reads:
“I never fully supported the hiring of Pres. Sullivan because I did not sense that she could move the University forward. ... So I was fully supportive of the Board’s action. That said, I believe the Board has not handled this matter well.”
Alumni Association President Tom Faulders delivering a printout of comments to the Board of Visitors Other themes that emerged were a largely negative response to increasing the prevalence of online education at U.Va. and objections to the composition of the Board, both the process of member appointment and lack of faculty representation. Seventeen percent of the sample explicitly called for the resignation of Board members. Many also shared objections to cutting several liberal arts departments.
“About 95 percent of our respondents were dissatisfied with the events, whether they wrote about their objection to the process or supported Sullivan’s reinstatement,” says Brittany Averette, new media director at the Alumni Association.
“One of the fundamental missions of any alumni association is to provide alumni with accurate, clear and timely communications,” says Faulders. “But perhaps a less obvious mission, but no less important, is to provide alumni a voice when they have something important to say or contribute. The online portal created for alumni to convey their thoughts to the Board of Visitors proved very valuable to both alumni as well as the Board.”
Comments
Great job Alumni Association President Tom Faulders for taking the lead by providing a forum that turned out splendidly beneficial to all concerned!!
Hopefully lessons have been learned which will be beneficial in the years to come.
I commend the Alumni Association for informing alumni about this unpleasant episode, and even more for seeking the input of alumni. Going forward, the University faces so many issues, some perhaps unique to UVA but others shared by all public universities and indeed by higher education in America. As one example, the growing pressure to focus on STEM subjects, while understandable and even necessary to a degree, raises many questions about the purpose of the higher education. I hope the Alumni Association will continue to invite the views of alumni at other critical junctures. We may be looking at a reinvention of the university as we have known it, and I want to have a voice in that process. Thanks!
I believe that the recent hiring/firing/reinstatement debacle has shown the University of Virginia community several things: 1, While we can't know what goes on behind closed doors, demanding insight and disclosure into deciding factors and data points is valid. 2, The Alumni Association is powerful, farther-reaching than we realized, and its influence was employed wisely in this case to share current goings-on with those of us farther-afield who still love Mr. Jefferson's University. 3, Personal politics have no business in higher education and the goal now must be to ensure the reputation of the University does not suffer due to this negative publicity.
I was one of the 5% who supported the board's decision. It took a firing of the president to finally get UVa to come up with an internet strategy. And after reinstatement she still has had failed to put forward a good strategic plan for UVa, which really was the main reason she was let go. There are many things that need to be improved; as an example, our alumni relations is pathetic compared to what Princeton has for their alumni. I attend all my fiance's Princeton events with envy and wonder why UVa can't do those things. UVa is amazing but trumpeting historical greatness while competitors change for the better is not a sustainable solution. Yes the board could of handled the situation better, but that's spilled milk. Let's get on with what needs to be done.
My outrage stems (notice I did not use the past tense), not from what the board did, but how they did it. To fire her without recourse was one thing, to show up at her home unannounced, and uninvited was the hieght of poor manners. The work of a lowlife. I still stand by my comment that she (Dragas) should be tarred and feathered and run out of the state. My opinion, for what its worth, is that it was a peersonal issue with Dragas. She wanted to show how important she was...pure arrogance. Govenor Bob lost any further political support from me for reappointing her.
While I might not go as far as tarring and feathering, I completely agree with Mr. Swayne. My outrage is still much in the present in regards to the way Mrs. Dragas handled herself and the fact that she got rewarded for her efforts! Just more proof that all you need to do to survive a scandal is have no shame and sit tight. As for internet learning/teaching: Anyone who has taught or been in an online class knows how they are not the be all and end all that everyone wants to think they are. I've been on both sides of online learning. Online classes provide an extremely poor substitute for the real thing. Just because Stanford and U Penn are doing it and a couple of op-ed pieces are written by journalists doesn't mean UVA needs to immediately follow suit. True vision is knowing when to take the time to think about whether your institution needs to follow others or be a leader in it's own right.
First, thank you Mr. Faulders for digesting and summarizing in a very short period of time what appear to be at least several reams of alumni communications concerning the Sullivan dismissal matter. As several quoted alumni have said, I do not know enough about the matters before the Board of Visitors to have an informed opinion as to whether President Sullivan should or should not have been dismissed -- and, similarly, neither do I have an informed view as to her reinstatement. The conclusion that leaps from this is that the Board of Visitors process is, to say the least, broken and would benefit from a bit of sunshine. Over a lengthy career dealing with individuals and organizations I have found that inclusiveness, while more difficult and frequently fractious, produces better results than exclusivity. So the Board, in reaching decisions, might benefit from hearing broader, impartial and informed views on issues before it, rather than the view apparently communicated to each Board member individually by a single person through a set of telephone calls.
In the aftermath of this illuminating saga, one final point still eludes me. President Sullivan’s reaction after her reinstatement was an inspiring lesson in selflessness and generosity, while the governor’s decision to reappoint Mrs. Dragas could be understood as an elegant gesture of political equanimity. But no matter how forgiving our president has been, I am baffled at the rector’s insistence to stay at her post. In my mind, her decision not to bow out and leave the university only confirms her inability to comprehend the full extent of her actions. We should have the courage to assume our shortcomings, and to show at least in defeat the fairness and grace we lacked in battle.
I concur with the comments of Eric Hollingsworth du Plessis. As an executive in an international company I have seen all sorts of behaviour and can discern poor leadership as well as any other objective observer. From the way she began this whole "event" through to the awkward and quite clearly suboptimal compromise solution, Mrs Dragas has shown extremely poor leadership skills. Like most, I never received and still don't have the facts (in plain English) for the Rector's beliefs that led to the ousting of President Sullivan in the first place. So it is difficult to tell whether there is or isn't a valid case to be made. But the very manner of the ousting and the tardy attempt at a cover-up that followed shows quite clearly that Mrs Dragas is out of her depth and should go. No matter how magnanimous President Sullivan is or can be, the fact remains that UVA is left with a Rector that is not competent for the job.
In my humble opinion the focus of this controversy is on the wrong issue. Mr Jefferson's University, as it has hastened along the path of its peers in expanding its mission and building itself into an internationally acclaimed institution, has become a bloated monster that can neither fund itself nor provide an affordable education to rising generations of Virginians. Why are we fixated on the school's reputation when so few of our children can afford to go there. Why should we tolerate uninterrupted increases in tuitions that have made attending this university and its peers a financial nightmare for families? A report just appeared that student loans now total $150 billion. Many holders of these loans don't have jobs--and never will! The reality is that the American university system is not financially viable. I don't believe our reinstated president is doing anything worthwhile about this--to busy making the community feel good about itself. While I doubt the board is doing much either, removing a happy face administrator is at least something. I for one am fed up with the pompt and circumstance. Why should we allow the university's bloated administration to operate on business model that is bad for the community it serves, bad for the students who go there, and bad for health of the institution? Let's talk about this.
Thank-you to the Alumni Association. I am convinced if it wasn't for the Alumni Association in taking the lead in receiving and summarizing alumni comments, we would not have the information we are due as alumni, donators and parents of current students. The University itself did an extremely poor job of informing us and keeping us informed. And mind you, I am in favor of more aggressive teaching techniques, but the Board's actions and lack of collaboration do nothing to lend confidence they are the right people to lead this important change.
So 80% of the respondents felt they had enough information to make an INFORMED opinion on the board's decision to replace President Sullivan? As someone who has tried hard to learn the details of the issues involved and the positions of both the board and the president, I find this difficult to believe. I agree that transparency and the manner in which this was handled could have been vastly improved but why are we so quick to applaud the many who acted on little information to pressure the board to overturn their critical decision? This baffles me. Maybe the decision should have been overturned but I fail to understand the source of other people's conviction. If the movement to reinstate the president was not based on a solid understanding of issues involved, then I view it with the same disappointment that I have for the board's handling of their decision.
I think the behavior of some on the board is what is questionable. How they handled it. When one looks at the hiring process to get Sullivan in and then how the "firing" process worked, a reasonable conclusion is some person(s) was up to no good. Should Sullivan have been removed with cause? Perhaps. That process just needed to be as carefully executed as the hiring process, which took quite some time to find the "right" person for the job and involved a wide variety of people throughout the University as such positional searches normally do. It's like end running around our Constitution with executive orders. If it doesn't pass Congress, why I'll just write an executive order and boom(!) law of the land. Gee this firing won't fly going through the normal process so we'll just squeezle her out by letting her know we have the votes and she should just resign and save the University the mess of the process. I don't think so. The provost should be fired for her conduct in this matter. They seem to do that in the military without any problem for senior level officers...
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