[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)
wws says:
June 11, 2012 at 12:42 pm
“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.
Wow, Sherlock, did you work that out all by yourself?
I could not imagine UVA bringing Mann back, much less offering an honor of any sort with regards to climate related science. He and the UVA cover-up / refusal to release documents has caused tremendous damage to UVA’s repetation. Mann did to UVA what Phil Jones did to EAU. Only UVA staff made it much worse. I would not hire from either of these universities.
Interesting that she was placed in her position just 2 months after Climategate I. Would this be related in any way?
Are we seeing a legal maneuver or are some seeing the writing on the wall? I hope it’s the latter.
Probably had a lot to do with fundraising and budgetary issues. If she was not seen as highly effective in getting UVa’s financial issues in order then that would create the context in which they were ready to move her aside quickly:
UVa budget problems
[from article at link]:
Also among those raising concerns was Vice Rector Mark Kington.
“We have to rethink the scope of our operations,” he said.
Later, he added: “As long as we don’t make the tough choices, we’re dragging the entire institution down.”
Luther Bl’t says: June 11, 2012 at 12:45 pm
President Sullivan has noted the effect of Gleik on Heartland donations?
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So please tell us the trend in Heartland donations. Or did I miss this in a recent thread?
polistra says:
June 11, 2012 at 1:12 pm
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.
One way or the other it’s about money, the budget was submitted last month, there appears to be concern about faculty salaries and the ability to attract new faculty to replace retirements.
She also co-authored a book with Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren. Over the past week or so some uncomfortable questions about the “metholdology” and facts that they used have come up.
So it may have nothing to do with Mann.
Louis Hooffstetter says:
June 11, 2012 at 1:26 pm
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)!
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A question: Did Kington have access to the files Sullivan and Mann are trying hide?
“… because she invited Katie Couric to be the 2012 Commencement Speaker .. ”
I doubt this. My college commencement had the President for the School of Clowns of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a speaker, so nothing could be worse.
@Dan in California
According to Heartland, the nett effect of the Gleick affair has been to increase their income. While some corporate donors have withdrawn their monies have been more than offset by an increase in individual donations.
So Gleick, in attempting by underhand means to discredit the Heartland Institute, has actually strengthened their position. I do not think I will be hiring him as my ‘strategy adviser’ on this showing. His ‘talents’ must lie elsewhere.
I wouldn’t jump the gun. More than likely this was a simple difference of opinion. Sounds as if the University has financial problems, perhaps it is something as simple as “things are much worse than she was admitting”. At best Mann might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
On the other hand. …
Too much speculation here for my tastes — despite my strong dislike for Dr. Mann and his poor science.
You know how fast and loose these “Moonbat” types play with the truth. That is until people start to take a closer look at their work.
Either way, this is going to be interesting.
“Dan in California says:
June 11, 2012 at 1:37 pm
So please tell us the trend in Heartland donations. Or did I miss this in a recent thread?”
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Up. Hearthland donations have gone up significantly since the fakegate.
What’s the significance of “the Kington Chair?”
If Mann were to get this, does it give him any say or influence over the release of his old emails? Does it give him access to his old email account such that once he got it, he can delete his old emails?
Alan says:
June 11, 2012 at 12:55 pm
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!
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That is a bit of a hard one. It has been a long legal battle. The Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, went after Mann’s E-mails as “discovery” in a case of misuse of taxpayer funds in the wake of the Climategate e-mails and the trashing of the “Hockey Stick graph” by Steve McIntyre.
It went all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court which held that the University of Virginia is not a “person” subject to a “Civil Investigative Demand” from the attorney general.
So the second salvo was fired. A FOIA from ATI (Dr. David Schnare) At this point things got sticky. UVA calls the documents “proprietary” and something they don’t want their competitors to have. However they gave copies to Michael Mann who works at Penn State. Penn State compete for research grants, quality students and quality faculty, and thus is a REAL competitor of UVA.
The judge doesn’t seem too impressed, especially with his “purity of heart” remark..
Here are links to the story as it unfolded
http://wattsupwiththat.com/tag/uva/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/tag/university-of-virginia/
http://http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/27/ati-press-release-on-the-mann-uva-emails/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/mann-uva-emails-released/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/02/michael-mann-wades-into-the-uva-thicket-as-intervenor/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/first-look-at-michael-manns-uva-emails/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/06/status-update-on-uvamann-foia-legal-fight/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/virginia-ag-loses-in-mann-uva-litigation-with-prejudice/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/25/atis-video-pitch-on-the-mann-uva-case/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/court-fight-manns-lawyer-and-uva-counsel-vs-ati/
Inside baseball:
In April, the Department of Environmental Sciences voted to offer the Kington Chair, donated by Board of Visitors’ Vice-Rector Mark Kington, to Mike Mann. This was Mann’s Department when he was at UVa.
The vote was at the urging of Associate Dean for the Sciences, James Galloway, who also is a very powerful member of the Environmental Sciences Department faculty. He is a far-left greenie, and pretty ruthless. But, such an appointment has to be approved by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Meredith Woo.
My Enviornmental Science contacts down there are minimizing the Department’s activity, under the assumption that Dean Woo would surely have enough sense to not go along with the Deparment’s vote. That being said, UVa is a “Chair-oriented” university, with the Dean usually not interfering with departmental hiring votes. So it is quite possible that it was approved. I have no information about this and my “friends” have clammed up.
Kington was one of three BOV members who met to recommend Sullivan’s termination/resignation. Whether Mann and the Department were any factor in this, whether it ever got to the level of the University President (it should have), and what she would have done about it are things that we just do not know.
One thing is certain: “philosophical differences” aren’t sufficient to support such a drastic and sudden action against a person who I believe was genuinely liked by most everyone there. Nor is a slight donor shortfall. Nor is a decline in research funding because the “stimulus” money ran out (Mann had, I think, about $600K in stimulus money at PSU).
One candidate is that her sacking of Leonard Sandridge, the COO with Charlottesville connections that go back to the ice age, may have encouraged revenge, and this was it. Whatever, it is dark, dirty and unseemly behavior that begs for a real explanation.
My own alma mater (the University of Nottingham) awards “The Order of the Boot” (Ordo Caligulae) to alumni who do exceptional service to the University. This is an in joke based on the fact that Jesse Boot, of Boots the Chemists, donated the land on which the Uni is built.
Sounds like UVa are borrowing the title, if not in the same spirit. Sounds like we should watch this space!
Why would Kington be so upset over the Mann appointment that he’d force Sullivan out? And wouldn’t Kington have had some say in who was offered the Chair? There’s a couple of dots that need more connecting here, imho.
This looks like a money issue and either she was either not “bold” enough in her cutting of expenses or not “bold enough” in her increasing the cash flow. Judging from the comment Skiphil posted June 11, 2012 at 1:03 pm, this would seem to be a key concern:
What I seem to hear from that is “health care costs are rising quickly, salaries in academia are rising quickly, our faculty has seen their compensation decline, we need ‘bold’ action”. They want someone who will allow them to jack up salaries.
Steve:
ODD MANN OUT ?
When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, it was to provide
an educational alternative for Virginia residents beyond the philosophically
hidebound (especially in science) teaching available at Catholic-based William
and Mary.
From the UVA Rector Dragas’ Remarks to VPs and Deans at:
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=18791
May we infer that Mike Mann is not the kind of “star hire”
the Board of Rectors is looking for ?
Does the overtly espoused philosophy and alleged behind-the-scenes
underhanded “scientific” and political activities of Mike Mann not
square with the Jeffersonian precepts that the Rectors seek to uphold ?
Looking at it from another direction, and I could be full of peas, not knowing the personal interactions involved: Is it possible that the Board is on Mann’s side, and she tried to rein them in on both the Chair offering and the megabucks they’re spending fighting the email releases? Could she have told them to knock it off, and they gave her the boot? Again, I realize I could be way off base.
Steve:
Sorry, that should have been Church of England instead of Catholic based.
There was a difference… but not much when it came to the sciences.
Neo says:
June 11, 2012 at 1:49 pm
“… because she invited Katie Couric to be the 2012 Commencement Speaker .. ”
I doubt this. My college commencement had the President for the School of Clowns of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a speaker, so nothing could be worse.
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Oh, I dunno. How about Al Gore?
Gail Combs says:
June 11, 2012 at 2:16 pm
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Good summary of links.
Newcomers to WUWT need to get in on what it’s all about with Mann and UVA. I don’t believe the MSN has touched on it much. Mann has been near the center of a lot of the mess with hockey sticks and CAGW and all the related issues.
The “official ” reason is money.