Dartblog

The Board of Trustees at UVA just turfed the school’s President, Teresa Sullivan. One of the justifications: a lack of vision. As always, it is hard to know what really happened, but the below paragraph from a Washington Post story on the event contains the kind of language that seems to come easily from the mouths of administrators all over the country. It will be familiar to denizens of Hanover. However, as we all know, the trick is to actually walk the walk.

Several academic leaders contend Sullivan had a clear vision for the university. Her top priority was to foster “the premier undergraduate experience in the United States,” along with top-ranked professional programs, and the capacity to hire and keep the best scholars for the faculty, Simon said. She envisioned a “radical” shift in undergraduate teaching, he said, to stress in-depth and one-on-one interactions for upper-level students, technology, and academic innovation for freshmen and sophomores.

Addendum: One of the recent popular actions by the UVA Board of Visitors was to raise the bottom of the university’s pay scale from $10.65/hour per hour to $11.30/hour. As we have previously noted, the baseline union wage plus pension benefits in Hanover — where the cost of living is lower than in Charlottesville — is over 50% higher than the new UVA figure.