[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
====================================
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.”
=============================================================
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)
Dave Walker,
The Insider Higher Ed article indicated that there was a disagreement with the Rectors over a move to online ed.
Looks like we can eliminate Mann as a factor in Sullivan’s dismissal. In an exchange today with a colleague in the Department of Environmental Sciences, I was told that Dean Woo rejected the Department’s recommendation to offer Mann the Kington professorship. Although this individual did not know Woo’s reasons, the speculation was that Mann was simply too much of a political liability.
Might it have something to do with this charge of scientific misconduct just beginning to gather some steam after twenty some years?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/11/The-Academic-Scandal-Elizabeth-Warren-and-Harvard-Dont-Want-You-to-Know-About
It might have nothing to do with Mann at all.
Even if there were any contention within UVA’s admin. or faculty over appointing or not appointing Mann I don’t think one issue like that could lead to the U’s president being dismissed. It is far fare more likely to have to do with fundraising, planning and budgetary issues as some of the articles have referenced. The Rectors would lose confidence in the pres. if (1) fundraising was inadequate, and/or (2) bad feedback was coming from major donors, and/or (3) the pres. was not following Board guidance (esp. on major financial matters, and/or (4) the Board did not see the pres. as capable of providing the leadership that would resolve major problems faced by the U.
Looking at various news stories, the board is boasting about its transparency, while others are saying the board has a record of non-transparency. Where have I heard that before?
Why apply “human subject safeguard standards” to bankruptcy records, which are a matter of public record? All the humans are identified there, specifically so everyone knows who they are. Hiding their identities doesn’t protect the human subjects.
AnonyMoose said on June 12, 2012 at 3:16 pm:
It protects the researchers from admitting how facts were “tweaked”. For example, it is “progressively” acceptable to say a personal bankruptcy was due to medical costs. It is less acceptable to admit those costs would be manageable except for their unrealistically-large mortgage payments, or that someone was justifiably fired and lost their medical insurance. That is, admit it was their own fault, not society’s, not the medical system’s.
With real names you could get real facts, re-analyze, and realize the researchers were really full of it.
I’m not academia nor science but, generally most things make sense but, this doesn’t.
We have a scientist who seems to firmly believe he can read the temperature of the earth by reading treerings and now someone wants to make him a head science guy. Are not there more rational choices? Was Bill Nye not available or do they think this would be a real steal from PS?
Maybe they’re starting a Voodoo Science Department.
http://www.readthehook.com/104213/cabal-hall-why-does-darden-trump-carrs-hill
Looks like the reality is a fight between the business school and the main university, with no mention of Mann to be found…
This will be interesting to follow – “Virginia Watchdog on Monday submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request for documentation, including recent communication between Sullivan and Board of Visitors. The university responded in part to the request on Monday with Sullivan’s initial presidential employment agreement, and has until next week to respond to the rest of the request.”
Will this FOIA also be considered by UCS to be threats/attacks on academic freedom as was the case with Mann? Will The University of Virginia decide to fight the FOIA as they did with Cuccinelli and ATI in their quest to obtain Mann’s communications? Will Virginia Watchdog be villainized by big media and big academia for seeking under FOIA the communications of faculty/staff at UVA in the same manner as the attacks leveled at the Virginia Attorney General and AtI by big media and big academia? If not, why? Wasn’t the argument by big science and big academia in Mann’s case that it was all about the ability to converse with colleagues without fear of private communications becoming public? I’m thinking once again we will be entertained by the abundant hypocrisy big media and big academia engage in on a daily basis.
harrywr2 says:
June 12, 2012 at 7:08 am
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.
I stand corrected — Nelson
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/16/Did-Breitbart-Investigation-Play-Any-Role-in-Sudden-Resignation-of-UVA-President
“Wednesday, June 13:
Continued speculation centered around the “philosophical differences” between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors. These differences seem to center on issues related to budgets and failure to hit fundraising targets.
Looming in the background are political differences between President Sullivan and the two most powerful politicians in the state–Republican Governor Bob McDonnell and Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. As Inside Higher Education reported:
Sullivan has taken high profile positions against the positions of the two most powerful Republican politicians in the state (while she has also worked with them on other issues). She has questioned the push by Governor Bob McDonnell to cap the use of tuition dollars to pay for financial aid for other students. (Governor McDonnell issued a statement of praise for Sullivan on Sunday.)
She also resisted many of the efforts of Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II to obtain records of a former faculty member who works on climate change. Cuccinelli argued that the records might show flaws in climate change research while many academic groups argued that he was trying to intimidate researchers who hold the consensus view that climate change is real. The Virginia Supreme Court in March backed the university’s position that Cuccinelli did not have a right to all of the papers. “