Follow-Up on the Ouster of UVA President Sullivan

This article on the firing of the University of Virginia President should make every voter think twice about electing a Harvard MBA to be President who was head of Bain Capital.  Bain is known throughout the world as a vulture capitalist group who under Romney and after would buy up companies, take out the profits, lay people off, and ship jobs overseas.   That is the real Romney legacy not the rewrite his consultants are trying to do along with the his millionaire/billionaire donors who helped create the problem we have today not Federal Civil Service.

Romney's disdain for the teachers, police, fire,  and civil servants is beyond disgusting but fits in with some of the MBA mentality -- only the bottom line counts not people.  Any Federal Employee who votes for Romney hasn't checked out the facts on the man they support because he doesn't support them.  He plans to lay off over 150,000 civil servants if he was elected even though many of those were hired because of mandates out of the Congress and as the group of civil service from the Vietnam War retied and were replaced.  

You want an example of what an MBA does to education look no further than the University of Virginia and their Board of Visitors headed by two MBAs who are out to change the whole culture of education at the university founded to educate students by Thomas Jefferson.  MBA's for the most part hate the humanities and it shows as that is the real reason that the current President of UVA was fired as she refused to cut two programs she felt added to the University. 

Why don't the students just become mind-numbed robots and take all the same busienss classes so they can be like Romney and the other very wealthy in this Country where it is all about the bottom line and people don't count.  (sarcasm) As Romney said  he loves to 'fire people!'  Another word for it is greed as we have seen happen in the last few years in this Country:

There’s a painful irony in all of this, of course: The same folks who championed the combination of tax kickbacks to the wealthy, deregulation, and insider trading that helped shatter the economy and hobble the budgets of colleges and universities are now increasingly running them. What these people like to call “strategic dynamism” produced binge profits, sure. But it ended up shredding the economy, and now it’s coming to a college or university near you. (If you haven’t seen The Chronicle of Higher Education piece on the idea of “strategic dynamism” and the role it played in Sullivan’s firing, you ought to check it out.) Boards like UVAs, increasingly made up of hedge fund operators, mortgage lenders, developers, and investment firm CEOs, are trained to put fast-paced change, short-term economic gain, and dramatic changes in asset allocation and in personnel ahead of long term, methodical academic planning, subordinating even the pretense of shared governance to the economic bottom line. It represents a culture of governance alien to the one we’re used to in higher education. As Kris Olds points out in a superb Inside Higher Education piece on UVAs Board, this is "a patently unbalanced and inward-oriented board, drawing from a very narrow segment of society," one prone to "group think."

Talk to any engineer who has to work for an MBA and about 95% of the time, they will tell you how bad they are because they are not for innovations.  All they care about is making money no matter what you have to do including bending the rules as witnessed by some of the aerospace companies who have way too many MBA's to the stage it is stiffling innovation.  Yet the Republican Party is poised to nominate someone who is the poster boy for being an MBA.

This story is far from over as the faculty have their say or are they supposed to shut up, sit down, and do as they are told which seems to be the mantra of MBA's no matter what they are doing.   They can only see the bottom line and could care less in this case about education.  If you want to be over a university that is a money maker go to Phoenix or Kaplan for profit universities but this is a public university established to educate students not for profit.   

The Silver Lining in the Ouster of UVA President Teresa Sullivan
June 19, 2012

It always helps to know your enemy, and boy, do we know our enemy now.

The recent ouster of Teresa Sullivan, a mini coup d’etat that had enough court intrigue to give Hilary Mantel's new novel, Bring Up the Bodies, a run for its money, may be the best thing that’s happened in higher education in a long time.

Why? Because her summary dismissal by the Board of Visitors, spear-headed by real estate developer Helen Dragas, the Board’s Rector, and its Vice Rector, Mark Kington (the head of a capital management firm who sits with Dragas on the BOD of the energy company, Dominion) makes it absolutely clear what is at stake in the corporatization of higher education: Goodbye shared governance, hello strategic dynamism.
(snip) 

You remember shared governance, right? In the old days, when the business of education was education, and not business, the academic mission of the university -- its courses, curricula, and programs -- could safely be delegated to the people who have the expertise: the faculty. So could the process of promotion and tenure. Now, however, the curriculum has become a product, the faculty are employees (increasingly limited to adjunct or part-time status), and the students consumers. In the process, academic issues have been transformed into economic issues, and so the faculty can no longer be trusted with them. The value -- and thus the viability -- of courses, programs and departments can no longer be separated from the maximization of revenue flows, or from the cant of productivity and quantifiable learning outcomes. Strategic dynamism is fast becoming the new bottom line, and all it wants to know is how departments and their faculties can perform in the context of short-term, wildly fluctuating financial exigencies. Why allow faculty a governance role in the curriculum when faculty want to protect the viability of traditional academic programs that supposedly put a drag on the university's finances and are irrelevant to the vocational needs of their students? Shared governance just looks absurd to people like Dragas and Kington. They're CEOs, developers, and investment fund executives. Whoever heard of shared governance in their world?

And finally, what happens to the humanities under such a regime? They shrink into irrelevancy and their departments close. It’s telling that the only concrete reason we’ve gotten for Sullivan’s ouster is that she apparently refused to cut the departments of German and Classics. It’s not hard to imagine that this is where the deeper story lies. According to an article in The Washington Post, “Leaders of the university’s governing board ousted Sullivan last week largely because of her unwillingness to consider dramatic program cuts in the face of dwindling resources and for her perceived reluctance to approach the school with the bottom-line mentality of a corporate chief executive.” Surely if the recent past is any indicator, many of these cuts would have come from the humanities and the liberal arts. Indeed, the statement she issued yesterday suggests this is the case. You can read it here.
To its credit, the AAUP saw this coming way back in 1966. Consider this introductory passage from the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities:

“[T]he academic institution, public or private, often has become less autonomous; buildings, research, and student tuition are supported by funds over which the college or university exercises a diminishing control. Legislative and executive governmental authorities, at all levels, play a part in the making of important decisions in academic policy. If these voices and forces are to be successfully heard and integrated, the academic institution must be in a position to meet them with its own generally unified view.”

“Less autonomy?" "Diminishing control?” "Unified view?" Indeed. If strategic dynamism is the ideal the Board at UVA was pushing, one doesn’t have to look far to see how recklessly that ideal operates, and how damaging it can be, for the firing of President Sullivan was clearly meant to be strategically dynamic. And boy did it backfire. But we shouldn’t be surprised. If it can screw up an entire nation’s economy it can certainly do the same thing to a university. The manner of Sullivan's firing is the best argument against the managerial ideal that drove it, and we can at least thank the UVA Board for dramatizing so brazenly what's at stake in the corporatizing of higher education.

Posted by Jay

The Ousting of University of Virginia President Sullivan Background

Some may ask what this has to do with someone in Oklahoma and I say a lot because it is giving us a look inside how the MBA wants to run things no matter who they are dealing with.  A public university is not a corporation and should not be treated like one.  It is also telling the rules don't apply to MBA's either which reminds of Presidential campaigns where rules don't apply.

Calling an emergency meeting when it looks like you already have someone in mind for the job and was against the rules doesn't seem very smart -- in fact it is downright stupid.

There’s one more wrinkle. Dragas said, in an interview, that “this decision [to force out Sullivan] should be judged after a new president is installed.” She’s saying that, when we compare Sullivan to the next president, then we’ll see that the next president is better. A reasonable inference is that Dragas already knows who the next president will be—that this isn’t a coup to eliminate Sullivan but, instead, to replace her with somebody specific. If that proves to be true, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the faculty will soon accept the legitimacy of that president, which will make his term awfully unpleasant.  

Is this an insight into what a Romney administration would be since MBA's are running everything around Romney?  They seem out of touch with ordinary Americans with some of their ideas.   People better think long and hard before they support an MBA for President.  The Corporate Board Room is not a stepping stone to the Presidency IMHO!

The Ousting of Sullivan: How We Got Here 

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 14, 2012

You’d really have to put a lot of work into something to fuck it up as badly as the UVA Board of Visitors has with their removal of Teresa Sullivan from the presidency. 

Based on all of the latest evidence to come out, here’s what happened. Rector Helen Dragas spent months persuading a majority of the 16-member board to support ousting Sullivan. To circumvent Virginia’s open meetings law, Dragas and vice rector Mark Kington talked with them one by one, apparently only meeting with those members who she thought were most amenable to supporting her plan. (Macdonald Caputo, Heywood Fralin, and Vincent Mastracco—and perhaps others—were not contacted until the last minute.) 

Somewhere along the line the growing group brought in the chair of the Darden School Foundation, Peter Kiernan. In an e-mail to fellow Darden trustees on Sunday, Kiernan made the mistake of telling the truth, describing how he’d worked with “two important Virginia alums” on the “project” to oust Sullivan. 

Governor McDonnell’s spokesman says that the governor was notified only days beforehand that Sullivan was to be forced out, apparently once Dragas had obtained enough support from the board to get a majority supporting the coup. 

On Friday, Sullivan was apparently informed that she could quit or be fired. 

On Sunday morning the Board of Visitors announced that they’d hold an emergency executive session that afternoon, giving just a few hours’ notice. That “emergency” bit is important. Under § 2.2-3701 of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, an “emergency” is “an unforeseen circumstance rendering the notice required by this chapter impossible or impracticable and which circumstance requires immediate action.” That’s what allowed them to meet without providing the three-day notice that’s legally required. The fact that this was planned for months makes clear that no such emergency could have existed. The meeting was illegal. The meeting involved just three members of the executive committee: Dragas, Kington, and Charlottesville developer Hunter Craig. Holding that meeting with little notice, on a Sunday, was advantageous to Dragas, since that prevented the attendance of executive committee members who opposed the coup against Sullivan. Macdonald Caputo was unable to travel, due to an injury. George Martin was out of the country, in South Africa. The vote was 3–0 to accept Sullivan’s “resignation.”

The story went public, and people immediately began to wonder why Sullivan had quit. Was she forced out? Was the board’s lack of explanation perhaps to spare her some humiliation?
Then that e-mail from Darden’s Kiernan got out. Today Kiernan resigned from the board, writing in a letter that his e-mail had been “confusing” (on the contrary, it was enlightening) and strained credulity with his claim that his work to toss the president was completely unrelated to the fact that he’s chairing Darden’s foundation. Kiernan’s e-mail was important, because it was the first piece of evidence that there was a long-term conspiracy, at the highest levels of the university—and perhaps the state—to force out the brand-new president.

(snip) 

How much damage? Rumor has it that members of the teaching faculty are talking about a boycott come fall semester, in two months’ time. It remains to be seen whether that will come to fruition, or what their specific demand is going to be. (An explanation? Re-hire Sullivan? Fire Dragas? Replace the whole Board of Visitors?) But if the Board of Visitors wants to play hardball, they may find that faculty are prepared to play, too. 

Despite everything that we know now, we still have no insight into the heart of the matter: why Sullivan was forced out. But we’ll know before long. There are too many people involved at this point, and there’s too much at stake. 

Excerpt:  Read More at http://cvillenews.com/2012/06/14/sullivan-story/

The following is a comment from the site that describes what is happening and what could be the consequences from a faculty perspective:

June 15, 2012 at 1:05 am 

The faculty senate is on this. I think there will be a faculty-wide meeting on Sunday and then they will meet with the BOV and the negotiations will begin. There could be a strike of sorts. I would participate. It is the public vs. the BOV at this point. The root problem is the way BOVs are appointed and the capturing of the University by corporate neoliberal (Dem and Rep) interests. Its about privatizing a public resource, thats what is behind these micro-political machinations. We need reform so tha the BOV looks more like the people of the Commonwealth and less like a corporate boardroom. That’s the heart of the matter. Do we want UVA turned into a diploma factory and a big business that merely prepares automatons for the global corporate economy? I think Sulivan stood up to this corporate bullying.Her allegiance is to the profession of education. 

I don’t think the MBA class thought much about pushback from the ranks, they are used to bullying thier employees in their corporations. This aint a corporation and I am hopeful the faculty won’t act like sheep. It is a line in the sand so to speak. On the other side of the line are the University of Phoenix model and is that what we want Jefferson’s university to become. We should go back to 1933 when the University was governed by the faculty. 

So that’s where this is not just about the BOV vs. the Faculty. Its is a public university and even those who never attend or don’t have arelative who attends have a dog in the fight. We need students, alums, and citizens weighing in and protesting. 

The legislature is the final authorizor of the BOV, even though the Gov. appoints. So that is why it is important that all citizens weigh in on this and protest going forward. Having David Toscano and Creigh Deeds involved is an imprtant first step. They need to convey to their colleagues the outrage and impropriety of this move. So its the fsuclty ,alums, students, and citizens vs. the elitist BOV and a small oligarichal cabal at that it turns out. 

What the Faculty Senate does next is important. They need to play hardball with these crooks and fascists. We all need to rally around the faculty as they may become a fulcrum of potential change. 

My demands would be: 

1. Dismiss the BOV
2. Reinstate Sullivan
3. Change the appointment process for BOVs 

If there is public action planned by the Faculty Senate, I urge all of you in the public to participate in that action, don’t lreave the faculty hanging. There is power in numbers. Its a public university and it belongs to the pubic, not a group of fat cat corporate types who have the morality which brought on the depression we are all in.