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Education

U-Va. Faculty Senate to meet in emergency session Sunday over Teresa Sullivan’s ouster

By Daniel de Vise and Anita Kumar,June 17, 2012

The University of Virginia Faculty Senate will meet Sunday in emergency session in advance of a Monday meeting with the school’s Board of Visitors over the removal of President Teresa Sullivan, senate leaders announced.

The 5 p.m. meeting of the senate’s executive council is open to the public and will be held in the Darden Abbot Auditorium of the university’s business school, according to an announcement on the senate’s Web site.

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.

Sullivan’s resignation after less than two years has prompted an unprecedented backlash on the historic Grounds: a flurry of no-confidence votes and protest letters from groups of faculty, administrators and students; a 2,000-signature petition; and a Facebook protest page with more than 3,000 members. Many want the enormously popular president reinstated.

Nearly everyone at the Charlottesville campus thought Sullivan was off to a promising start. She spent her first year in office installing an estimable team of top administrators and her second year strengthening the university’s academic model, just as she had been tasked by the board that hired her.

But at least one key player did not agree: Helen Dragas, a savvy, fiscally conservative developer from Virginia Beach appointed to the board in 2008 by then-Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and promoted to rector of the 16-person board last summer. Her misgivings about Sullivan would pit the university’s first female rector against its first female president.

The following account is based on conversations with more than a dozen current and former board members, state and university officials, faculty and others with direct knowledge of the events. Some spoke on the record; others did not, saying they were not authorized to speak. Board members referred inquiries to Dragas, who said she cannot discuss personnel matters.

Dragas had reservations about Sullivan from the start, the sources said. By the time she took the reins as rector, Dragas was becoming convinced that Sullivan would not make the hard spending decisions necessary to keep U-Va. competitive in a volatile higher education marketplace. In conversations before and since the ouster, Dragas has portrayed Sullivan as an adequate day-to-day caretaker but someone incapable of long-term vision.

Dragas laid the groundwork for Sullivan’s removal over several months, working in secret with a small team of collaborators. They included vice rector Mark Kington, a venture capitalist from Alexandria and former business partner to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), and Peter Kiernan, a New York investor who led the foundation of the university’s business school.

On Friday, Michael Strine, U-Va.’s chief operating officer and one of Sullivan’s top deputies, read a statement at a staff meeting to quell rumors that he, too, was involved in her removal. He acknowledged meeting with members of the governing board and said they posed critical questions about Sullivan. He said he told the board members to take their concerns to Sullivan, according to two people who were there.

Strine declined an interview request Saturday but provided this statement:

“It is my role to work on behalf of both the President and the Board of Visitors. It is also my role to regularly meet with members of the Board of Visitors at their request on a variety of issues. I was made aware of the Board’s dissatisfaction with the President’s progress on certain goals in group meetings that included the President and others and I worked very hard and consistently on her behalf to close that gap. We all want what is best for the students, patients and others this great University serves.”

The campaign to remove Sullivan began around October, the sources said. The Dragas group coalesced around a consensus that Sullivan was moving too slowly. Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

Sullivan’s position was clear. In a cordial Q and A posted to a U-Va. news site in March, Sullivan was asked whether there was “room to reduce spending.” Her reply: “[I]n terms of big areas where there are obvious cost savings, I don’t think we have those. . . . ” The university was already “pretty lean,” she said. “I worry about getting very much leaner.’’

Supporters say Sullivan was a consummate public university president who understood finance as well as anyone on campus.