Meanwhile the student-run and independently funded Daily Cavalier newspaper got the board's email exchanges by submitting a Freed of Information Act request.
Today, a colleague from UVa forwarded an email making the rounds that summarizes and interprets the emails. I am told I can distribute it at will, so I am. It's long, but an interesting read. If this story interests you, it's worth it.
From: "The.UVa Emails" Date: June 20, 2012 10:00:09 AM EDT
To: "The.UVa Emails" Subject: Summary and analysis of the FOIA'd UVa emails (version 1.0)
The following is a summary/interpretation of the Cavalier Daily tweets of the FOIA'd UVa emails. (N.B. there may be minor errors below because the full text of the emails -- whose authenticity is confirmed -- was published after this was written. The tweets can be found here and the full text of the emails can be found here.)
(1) In recent months, the UVa Rector and ex-Vice Rector seem to have persuaded themselves that online technology was about to cause a profound disruption/revolution in higher education. They came to this conclusion (or the conclusion was affirmed in their minds) after they read:
(a) a 4/8/12 Chronicle article by CUNY dean Ann Kirschner entitled, "Innovations in Higher Education? Hah! College leaders need to stop talking about transformation before it's too late," which speculated that "[t]he ultimate threat to universities could come from the disaggregation of the degree, as students take advantage of the growing availability of open-source learning networks to present evidence of competency to prospective employers";
(b) a 5/3/12 op-ed by NYT columnist David Brooks on "The Coming Tsunami" in higher education, which praised the for-profit University of Phoenix, the for-profit online-education company Coursera, and the nonprofit Harvard/MIT online education partnership edX, and speculated that "what happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education";
(c) a 5/30/12 WSJ article on "Higher Education's Online Revolution," written by two Hoover Institution-affilliated academics who cited the for-profit University of Phoenix as well as the edX partnership to advance a bold, if speculative, claim:
"Over the long term, online technology promises historic improvements in the quality of and access to higher education. The fact is, students do not need to be on campus at Harvard or MIT to experience some of the key benefits of an elite education. Moreover, colleges and universities, whatever their status, do not need to put a professor in every classroom. One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, and for a very reasonable tuition price. Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive."
(N.B. The Rector told the ex-Vice Rector in an email that this WSJ article demonstrated "why we can't afford to wait" -- presumably, to force President Sullivan's resignation.)
2. Harvard MBA and UVa Bachelor of Science alumnus Jeff Walker, a major UVa donor, told the Rector that the "on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line [sic] universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind" and sent the Rector a video about a "hugely successful on-line course at Stanford" that promised, according to the Cavalier Daily reporter's summary, to "lower costs" and "improve[] productivity." The Rector responded: "BOV is squarely focused on UVa's developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly accelerating pace of change."
(N.B. The Rector appears not to have (a) questioned Walker's assumption that the higher education industry is about to enter an era of survival-of-the-fittest competition; (b) asked if the future envisioned by Walker might not allow, as it does today, for a diversity of approaches to higher education; (c) researched the claim that online delivery of higher education lowers costs and improves productivity; (d) asked if online education results in better or worse educational outcomes; or (e) raised any questions about possible differences in mission between for-profit and nonprofit private institutions of higher education, on the one hand, and public institutions of higher education, on the other.)
3. The Rector sent the ex-Vice Rector a 6/3/12 Williams College commencement address by Dr. Atul Gawande that argued that calamitous failure can sometimes only be avoided by assuming a high degree of risk. According to Gawande: "All policies court failure—our war in Iraq, for instance, or the effort to stimulate our struggling economy. But when you refuse to even acknowledge that things aren’t going as expected, failure can become a humanitarian disaster. The sooner you’re able to see clearly that your best hopes and intentions have gone awry, the better. You have more room to pivot and adjust. You have more of a chance to rescue." (Presumably, the Rector interpreted this article as justification for carrying out a bold, if risk-laden, "rescue" operation at UVa, whose goal apparently was to avoid an unspecified "humanitarian," or other, "disaster" down the road.)
4. The ex-Vice Rector emailed the Rector on 6/10/12: "Darden [Business School] is a near and visible template for much of what we seek." What this statement means is unclear, but it is worth noting that Darden receives no funds from the State, is a professional school, and charges what industry insiders consider to be "market-rate" tuition. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also the school from which the Rector and the ex-Vice Rector received their two-year postgraduate degrees.
5. At the Sulgrave Club in Washington, D.C., venture capitalist Jeff Neuchterlein (a UVa College and Law School alumnus) appears to have questioned President Sullivan about what UVa was planing as far as online education was concerned. Neuchterlein later told the ex-Vice Rector, in a private email, that he found the President's response [which is not summarized in the Cavalier Daily tweets] to be "rather pedestrian."
(N.B. In her final statement to the Board of Visitors, President Sullivan had this to say about the online delivery of postsecondary education:
"There is room for carefully implemented online learning in selected fields, but online instruction is no panacea. It is surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential, and unless carefully managed, can undermine the quality of instruction."
6. The Rector and ex-Vice Rector seem to have conspired to remove the President, exchanging between themselves (on 6/2/12) drafts of a public statement announcing the President's dismissal and meeting -- privately, it seems -- to handle loose ends before any "group" meeting took place (meaning, presumably, a meeting of the Board of Visitors).
7. The ex-Vice Rector inadvertently acknowledged the lack of transparency surrounding the forced resignation of President Sullivan when he emailed the Rector and COO Strine on 6/11/12: "[M]aybe a modicum of candor is called for."
8. In a 6/12/12 email to the Rector, ex-Vice Rector, and Provost Simon, COO Strine seems to have consented to publicly making the argument that there was a need for "urgency and action" given the financial/academic environment. Presumably, such an argument would have helped legitimize what the Rector and Vice Rector had just done -- namely, force the abrupt resignation of President Sullivan.
9. The same day, the ex-Vice Rector emailed the Rector, Provost Simon, and COO Strine, urging them to publicly make "the case for unavoidable change" -- presumably, the "unavoidable change" of a forthcoming disruptive/revolutionary transformation of the higher education industry. (This is a speculative argument, but one that the ex-Vice Rector appears to have believed would justify radical change imposed from above, including the forced resignation of President Sullivan.)
***
Thus did a handful of wealthy and well-connected individuals who have no recognized credentials or expertise in the field of higher education, including two members of the Board of Visitors (namely, the Rector, a real-estate developer appointed by Governor Kaine, and the ex-Vice Rector, a venture capitalist appointed by Governor McDonnell), privately persuade themselves that a revolution was on the horizon and that this revolution -- the arrival, trajectory, and outcome of which are, to say the least, uncertain -- necessitated destabilization of one the world's great public research universities and the public and private humiliation of UVa's first woman president, the internationally esteemed scholar and public higher education leader, Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan.
[N.B. Neither Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan nor anyone who knows her personally played a role in the drafting of this email message or possessed advance knowledge of its dissemination.]
Now, whatever you think about the future (or present, or past) of higher education, the potential of on-line learning (and I'm an academic, so I have opinions) - at least one takeaway is the total disconnect between the BOV - its corporate types - and the extremely fine public university that it is responsible for. That disconnect extends to governance, transparency, accountability...
What is heartening is that neither the officers of the university(i.e. all the deans), the students nor the faculty are standing for it - and they may win in the end.