Board to U-VA President: Here’s Your Hat; What’s Your Hurry?

Inside Higher Ed today carries a lengthy article today on the dismissal of the president of the University of Virginia (after only a two-year term) by its equivalent of the Regents – known there as the Board of Visitors. (Technically, she agreed to resign.) U-VA has often been paired with the U of Michigan for its move toward semi-privatization (more reliance on tuition and other funding sources and less on the state). The head of the Board issued a press release on the dismissal explaining the decision (excerpts):

We see no bright lights on the financial horizon as we face limits on tuition increases, an environment of declining federal support, state support that will be flat at best, and pressures on health care payors. This means that as an institution, we have to be able to prioritize and reallocate the resources we do have, and that our best avenue for increasing resources will be through passionate articulation of a vision and effective development efforts to support it. We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions…

To achieve these aspirations, the Board feels the need for a bold leader who can help develop, articulate, and implement a concrete and achievable strategic plan to re-elevate the University to its highest potential. We need a leader with a great willingness to adapt the way we deliver our teaching, research, and patient care to the realities of the external environment. We need a leader who is able to passionately convey a vision to our community, and effectively obtain gifts and buy-in towards our collective goals…

The Board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource development and in resource prioritization and allocation. We do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change…

Full statement available at http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=18791

The detailed Inside Higher Ed article describing the decision is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/11/u-virginia-president-leave-over-philosophical-differences

U-VA is a high-profile university and these events will undoubtedly be noticed by the UC Regents and others in the world of higher education. Apparently, there is significant faculty concern about the sudden dismissal.

Sometimes. Not always.

UPDATE: Press conference with head of Board:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6VsLByAXE&w=320&h=195]
News clip:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEu49Ead2Ek&w=320&h=195]

UPDATE: Academic Senate expresses concern at U-VA as reported by Inside Higher Ed:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/12/faculty-leaders-question-ouster-virginia-president

UPDATE: Board of Visitors head responds to faculty:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/14/new-statements-ouster-virginia-president

Don’t Look for Holiday Cheer from the Washington Post

The Washington Post has looked west of late:

UC-Berkeley and other ‘public Ivies’ in fiscal peril

Daniel de Vise, Dec. 26, 2011, Washington Post

Across the nation, a historic collapse in state funding for higher education threatens to diminish the stature of premier public universities and erode their mission as engines of upward social mobility. At the University of Virginia, state support has dwindled in two decades from 26 percent of the operating budget to 7 percent. At the University of Michigan, it has declined from 48 percent to 17 percent. Not even the nation’s finest public university is immune. The University of California at Berkeley — birthplace of the free-speech movement, home to nine living Nobel laureates — subsists now in perpetual austerity. Star faculty take mandatory furloughs. Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones…

Tuition costs surging

In academia, there is particular concern for the sector leaders known as “public Ivies.” These top public universities (a group that includes Berkeley, UCLA and the universities of Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia) educate many more students than their Ivy League counterparts. Berkeley alone serves roughly the same number of low-income students — measured in federal Pell grant data — as the Ivies do together…

Full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/uc-berkeley-and-other-public-ivies-in-fiscal-peril/2011/12/14/gIQAfu4YJP_story.html

Thanks to Mike Lofchie for this reference.

Another Reminder, Courtesy of the U of Virginia, That Nothing Is Private at Public Universities

U. of Virginia Agrees to Release Climate Researcher’s E-Mails

May 25, 2011. Chronicle of Higher Ed

The University of Virginia has agreed to turn over a potentially enormous trove of climate-research e-mails and other documents to a conservative group that filed a demand for them under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The demand centers on more than a decade’s worth of e-mail messages from, to, and about Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist who left the university in 2005 to become director of a research center at Pennsylvania State University. The organization, called the American Tradition Institute, joined with a Republican state legislator to file its request after the university went to court to fight an attempt by Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, to use a different law to get the same documents, which he said he needed to investigate possible climate-research fraud. In a court document signed yesterday, the university said it would produce the materials within three months.