[UPDATE: 4:30PM PST The plot thickens. Breitbart is reporting that Sullivan has a history with scientific misconduct charges, as well as investigations that exonerate without actually asking the tough questions. h/t to reader Holly Martin ]
Hmmm, this is more than a little strange. From the Examiner: The Board of Visitors announces: UVa President Teresa Sullivan will step down
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Early on Sunday morning (6/10/2012), UVa Alumni received a stunning email sent by Helen E. Dragas, Rector, and Mark Kington, Vice Rector of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, that conveyed startling news:
On behalf of the Board of Visitors, we are writing to tell you that the Board and President Teresa Sullivan today mutually agreed that she will step down as president of the University of Virginia effective August 15, 2012.
In January of 2010, President Sullivan had been unanimously elected by UVa’s governing Board. Rector John O. Wynne, who had chaired the board’s special committee on the nomination of a President, had described Teresa Sullivan as a person of integrity and vision, and “an extraordinary talent who brings to the University an enormous depth and breadth of experience in every aspect of public higher education.”
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Now, after reading that, wondering about the abruptness of it all, try to connect these dots:
- Environmental Sciences, at the behest of the Dean of Science, votes to offer Mike Mann the Kington Chair, which was designated as going to a climate person. See Climate Depot story here.
- Mark Kington, a member of the Board (and Vice Rector) gets wind of it.
- Kington calls a quorum of the Board of Visitors and fires Sullivan.
- Maybe this is idle speculation, but why did they have to fire her so quickly and on a Sunday morning? And, just 15 months after her inauguration? Couldn’t it have waited until their next meeting? Inquiring minds want to know!!!
The official firing line is: “A philosophical difference of opinion”. Given what was said about Sullivan at the outset, surely this does not merit an action like this done in stealth mode on a weekend with the bare minimum quorum? This doesn’t pass the sniff test, something smells fishy to me.
In the middle of all this, during Sullivan’s brief tenure, we have UVa spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal contortions trying to prevent Mann’s UVa emails from seeing the sunlight of FOIA requests.
Let the speculation begin.
Related articles
- BREAKING: Virginia President, in Split With Board, Resigns (insidehighered.com)
- Teresa Sullivan, U.Va. president, steps down (wjla.com)
- Sullivan to resign as president (starexponent.com)
- U. of Virginia president to leave over ‘philosophical differences’ (insidehighered.com)
He’s got something very disturbing on her and offered her the choice to either resign or to read mikey’s book and attend one of his lectures. She chose the course of least resistance. Wise move.
Did he get unfriended at Penn State?
The big deal in the background is these sticky incidents hamper donations. Now if some donor at VA says he won’t donate, the Board gets the message the President of the university ignored. VA just doesn’t need the bad publicity.
Fired early before Church. I still think Mann’s hiring is still at risk.
She may have been told to kill the deal and refused.
Sometimes coming to WUWT is like visiting a real media outlet, which is almost non-existent these days. It’s oftentimes as if Anthony Watts is an honest-n-true journalist intent on breaking and “sniffing” out stories. Huh. And I thought this just some nerdy science site. (don’t hit me, I mean well)
To paraphrase Lewis Carroll: “Curiouser and curiouser”
Yep, just speculation, but I like it so far !!
As always in these things, look at the language carefully, since this has clearly been parsed by a team of lawyers. They work hard not to say anything that anyone could take offense at, BUT if you look carefully you can see that they are also telling all of us quite a lot with this announcement.
Often one sees in these things that he or she “left to pursue other interests”, or “has decided to resign for personal reasons” after which the board will express its condolences. But that is NOT what was said here; instead it was:
“we are writing to tell you that the Board and President Teresa Sullivan today mutually agreed that she will step down”
Not hard to see that she was quite clearly fired with no regrets on the part of the Board, who this points out agreed with this outcome wholeheartedly.
President Sullivan has noted the effect of Gleik on Heartland donations?
The Mann Stick – tree calibration
If you have 100 trees and 99 correlate with temperature, then they are quite likely good proxies and it will do no harm to the analysis to include the 1 one tree that didn’t calibrate.
But if you have 200 trees and only 99 correlate with temperature, then the 101 trees that don’t calibrate tell you that the other 99 are probably not very good proxies either.
In this case you want to include the 101 that didn’t correlate, so you don’t over estimate the confidence and under estimate the error in the result.
However if you only report the trees that do calibrate, then both groups of 99 trees will appear of equal quality when in fact the first group is very likely a much better proxy than the second.
This leads to spurious conclusions because you will then weight each group of trees equal in reliability when in fact they are not at all equal.
The problem is that climate science (hockey stick) hides the trees that don’t correlate which makes all trees look like equally good proxies, even when a high number of trees in a sample are telling you they are not reliable.
http://i45.tinypic.com/b68vhi.jpg
Color Palette: 1=2=3=4=5=6=7=8= etc
[SNIP: If that was meant to be funny it is in fact defamatory. If you are serious, provide a link. -REP]
It’s hard to “connect the dots” when I don’t understand the significance of the “dots” or the people involved. Can you provide more background information? Inquiring minds certainly do want to know!
Ferd Berple:
It’s much more like 9,990 that don’t correlate, 7 that correlate weakly, an upside-down lake sediment study, YAD061 and a Greybill stripbark bristlecone that strongly correlate. Until 1960.
Wow, this is a huge happening, whatever the reason(s). Major universities virtually never have a President serve such a brief term. Although the presidential terms aren’t as commonly a decade or two the way they used to be, I can recall very few cases of a term less than 5-8 years for a president of a major university. And to basically fire her so abruptly, well yes, this is big news in the education world, whatever the cause(s). Also, there was much hoopla about Sullivan as the first woman president at UVa, so the Board would not make waves like this unless they thought there was compelling reason.
Actually, the Board might have decided that Pres. Sullivan was unbearably shallow because she invited Katie Couric to be the 2012 Commencement Speaker:
Katie Couric on getting her call from President Sullivan
[from Katie Couric’s 2012 commencement address to UVa, re waiting for invitation to be Commencement Speaker for UVa]: “….but year after year that call never came … but finally, this year, the call came from Terry Sullivan. I guess it took the first woman to lead the University in 193 years to get the job done!”
29 months.
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Academic infighting don’t you love it, no wonder I’m thinking about going back into teaching K-12!
Mods, the link on this thread to the Inside Higher Ed item doesn’t seem to work. This is the link I found after a search on that site (different number in the date):
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/08/breaking-virginia-president-split-board-resigns
She left in the same way she arrived, fired with enthusiasm
She shook up the finances. Cherchez la Femme, Maria Theresa’s Almighty Thaler.
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A univ president’s job is fund-raising. Nothing more, nothing less.
If a president gets fired, it’s because of poor fund-raising one way or another. Either she did something specific that caused big alumni to close their wallets, or she’s generally behaving in a way that displeases the big donors.
where’s det. insp. mosher?
Is Sullivan the Mann-prop? Or are the Board (Kington and his faction) really on the Hockey-stick Team?
In the UK – with little knowledge of – and rather less interest in – College politics (our own national politics require a headache pill every time you think of them!): – sorry. something plainly causes nasal receptor overload.
But – what? Pass.
Connect the dots eh
Well let me see: 2+2= err um
this is very much a work in progress, but I will get back to you all!
Er um
Universities are facing the higher ed bubble that will doom many. Administrative expenses have skyrocketed resulting in massive tuition increases.
Open course ware, Khan Academy type educations will be cheap. There are no jobs, so why go into debt for 100,000?
And Mann’s coverup turns off half or more of your potential students. They can and will go elsewhere.
Update.
My earlier suggestion that the alternative offered to Sullivan was ‘to read mikey’s book and attend one of his lectures’ was clearly in error. I withdraw the suggestion that Mr. Kington would have ever offered such a cruel and unusual (and unconstitutional) alternative. She went of her own accord. 🙂
If Mark Kington, member of the Board and Vice Rector, fired Sullivan to prevent Mann from getting the Kington Chair, I heartily applaud his actions (regardless of how politically and/or financially motivated they may be)!