[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)
Kinda embarrassing that this site would go completely National Enquirer with no evidence of why she was fired, only baseless specualtion. Almost no chance it was Mann or warming, it was the money:
http://wamu.org/news/12/06/11/uva_rector_addresses_university_presidents_resignation
Read Schauchman on Warren. He had her number 20 years ago and it wasn’t 1/32nd. It was academic fraud, hiding data and code and otherwise perversely corrupting science, such as her field was. A dismal record.
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Well, heck. You all are way ahead of me on Schuchman. That’s what I get for taking a break to clear the air.
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Again, maybe I’m out of date, but has the source of the funding for UVA’s Piltdown Mann been revealed? A lot of money came in a hurry, quietly.
Send shysters, gats, and loot.
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I mean UVA’s legal defense of Mann’s emails.
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Beale says:
June 11, 2012 at 4:25 pm
It sounds as though the Board wants a president who will reverse the University’s decline. They will not find one.>>>>
Well clearly they learned nothing from Mann. So much easier just to hide it….
I have a picture with Teresa Sullivan at UT-Austin. She gave me my diploma (Ph.D in chemical engineering) in 1997. I think she was dean of the graduate school at the time.
Nerd says: June 11, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Rattus Norvegicus says:
June 11, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Next time read carefully. I did read Breitbart’s book “Righteous Indignation” and I know how they operate. Maybe you should read the book and find out why.
Obi-Wan Andrew taught his Padawans well. God Bless those guys, Tip of the Spear!
Personally, I kinda doubt her “departure” was due to offering Mann the Kington Chair.
On the other hand, if it was, watch out for the other shoe to drop. Kington is (amongst other things) a senior member of the board of Dominion Resources which is a major player in the energy sector. If this really is tied up somehow with trying to appoint Mann to the Kington Chair, it will only be a matter of time before someone spin’s it as “big oil” getting her fired.
It looks like a change at the top at UVa. May we hope a change of policy with regard to the Mann emails will follow. They surely must be getting sick of pouring money down the drain in legal fees fighting to keep Mann’s emails secret. A new administration is likely to care less about revelations that might make the old administration look bad.
There will be more on this:
“UVa Faculty Presses Board On Removal Of President Teresa Sullivan
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/06/11/uva-faculty-presses-board-on-removal-of-president-teresa-sullivan/
Rattus Norvegicus says:
“Sorry, the original publication date seems to be 1989, edition listed on Amazon (and linked to in the article) is shown as 1999.”
The article at Breibart links to the book at Amazon. The paperback version was published in 1999; the hard cover at Amazon shows 1989. http://www.amazon.com/As-Forgive-Our-Debtors-Bankruptcy/dp/0195055780/ref=la_B001ITTT3Q_1_2_title_1_har?ie=UTF8&qid=1339479061&sr=1-2
Rattus Norvegicus says:
“Nerd, how about a link to the text quoted in the Breitbart article. This is the web, you know…”
Rattus, you have cited the Breitbart article without providing a link. Why do you want others to provide a link to an article that you have discussed but apparently not read completely? Go back, re-read the article, and pay attention to the last paragraph.
The money comment, by GaryS:
Just a quick comment in passing–as a non-academic who was fired for being too old (I have the NEOC and EOC paperwork) I will tell you that trying to work out university politics is like trying to understand what went on in the dungeons of old castles–the only thing that is ever clear is that somebody wanted to inflict serious pain on annoyers.
This is a good time to ask the perennially unanswered question:
As another poster pointed out, Kington is on the board of oil & gas company Dominion Resources. He is also a big contributor to Republicans, particularly Eric Cantor, so he might have taken serious issue with bringing one of the leading blowhards against eeeevvvilll big oil companies back into the fold following the $$$$$ thrown down a rathole by UVA essentially defending him by fighting the FOIA request.
Essentially this will come down to money. It’s likely that UVA lost a lot of Republican donors by spending money fighting the FOIA request that was being led by a Republican Attorney General and hiring Mann back was going to make the situation worse, not better. It seems that this would have been cleared by Kington in advance, but if not, Sullivan has a tin ear if she was going to appoint Mann to a seat endowed by a Republican with ties to oil. Perhaps she mistakenly believed that anyone who would endow a chair in Environmental Sciences automatically means that they are alarmists and would worship Mann.
Times they are a-changin’.
to me, the dots are beginning to connect…
hro001 says: June 11, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Sullivan’s CV… indicates that her background and areas of interest… are very far removed from anything that might impinge upon the holy writs of “climate science”. The closest thing I could find …was her participation in the NRC’s 2007-09 “Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age”.
Michael Patrick Leahy:
In 1990, Rutgers Professor Philip Shuchman charged Elizabeth Warren, along with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, her two co-authors of the 1989 book, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, with “scientific misconduct.” Warren’s friends and former colleagues at the University of Texas quickly completed an error-filled investigation.
This secret report was accepted… But the central charge made by Professor Shuchman was neither investigated nor refuted…
The secret report that “exonerated” Elizabeth Warren never asked this simple question: Did the authors arrange matters so that they could not provide access to the computer printouts by case, with corresponding bankruptcy court file numbers, thus preventing any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information?
Nelson says: June 11, 2012 at 11:52 pm
Kington is on the board of oil & gas company Dominion Resources. He is also a big contributor to Republicans… It’s likely that UVA lost a lot of Republican donors by spending money fighting the FOIA… Perhaps [Sullivan] mistakenly believed that anyone who would endow a chair in Environmental Sciences automatically means that they are alarmists and would worship Mann.
Perhaps Sullivan’s been supporting the fight to keep Mann’s data obstructed… like she did herself back in 1990 but her dirty washing is now coming to light… and what was she doing on that “Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age”? with her record of accusations of obstruction… now we see Heartland actually gaining financial support after Gleick, perhaps, little surprise to see Kington heading the group that convened to sack her (?)…
Best I can figure out she was fired because she’s a woman . . . or a member of some other oppressed minority.
A history question: Back in the day when I was a student, there didn’t seem to be much ethics overview of research involving human subjects. All kinds of research was done that wouldn’t pass muster now. Is it possible that the “human subject safeguards” fiasco was just a result of rules and mores that were rapidly changing?
“…misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.” Goethe
The question may not be whether the authors deliberately obfuscated their data but how people dealt with the problem when it was exposed.
There are other reasons possible here – one that strikes me is that Professor Sullivan was not seemingly interested in international links, which are basically the thing you have to do to get ahead in academia nowadays (whatever you say about the Climate Team, they are doing well on this front). She apparently once doubted (and this is hearsay, but from someone who met her professionally) why her faculty needed to travel outside Virginia. Considering the political links (and perhaps academic background) it is possible that Professor Sullivan’s problem is purely and simply that she is actually a leader of the last decade or even century, rather than one for now, and her vision was far too narrow. This would explain her popularity with faculty and students (universities are intensely conservative in nature and tend to resist change), but the lack of vision would be a problem for those charged with seeing UVa forward (the Rectors) and would be less attractive to donors, potential hard-hitting staff and funders and partners.
This may or may not tie into the Michael Mann issue. It is unlikely to be the issue itself – this is not headline news (unless in Virginia?) so we cannot say it was mishandled from the university’s point of view, but it may be indicative of the problem in some way, or even one of the issues raised.
It think the reasoning in this article is a little far-tetched. UVA has a academic faculty of over 2000 and an endownment of over $5 billion. Saying that Mann is the cause of this is like saying that a tree in Yamal proves AGW.
I’m in Charlottesville visiting a friend, and the firing is a big topic. Sullivan is not a UVA alumnus, and not connected to the big donors. Female donors gave more, but averall fundraising was down 10%to on her watch . She is also philosophically opposed to online education. No one here seems to even be aware of the ATI suit.
Academic politics is a murky business, but the pres has got to bring in the money, it’s job one for any university.
Nelson says:
June 11, 2012 at 11:52 pm
As another poster pointed out, Kington is on the board of oil & gas company Dominion Resources.
Dominion is not an ‘oil and gas company’. It’s primarily an electric utility and gas delivery utility.
Senator John Warner retired in 2009. Long serving Senators can easily steer lucrative federal government research contracts to their local universities. Virgina doesn’t have any long serving Senators anymore.
Climate research can be big money for a University…
http://www.uidaho.edu/newsevents/item?name=recipe-for-success-20-million-grant-supports-collaborative-climate-research
The five-year, $20 million USDA award will fund the work of a research team led by University of Idaho entomologist Sanford Eigenbrode. His team includes researchers from Idaho, Washington State University and Oregon State University, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The team will study impacts of climate change on Northwest wheat and barley production.
So a disagreement with the Rectors over how much investment should be made in what academic departments in order to attract federal research dollars is entirely reasonable.
List of top 25 research universities.
http://mup.asu.edu/research2010.pdf
In 2008 the University of Virginia helped itself to $200+ million in Federal Research money.
Based on the Breitbart piece, it would appear that Sullivan’s downfall may be collateral damage from Warren’s troubled candidacy for the MA senate seat. Breitbart is showing up the MSM by tossing out scoop after scoop. Go there and WUWT to get the newest news.
The Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch has a spin of its own: ” the chairman of the U.Va. business school’s foundation said he knew of “this project” to oust her weeks ago.” The executive council of the faculty senate says “We were blindsided by this decision,” and “”we still don’t have a good understanding of what’s happening.”
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/news/2012/jun/12/11/tdmain01-uva-president-learned-of-ouster-friday-af-ar-1980925/