Details Emerge About Ouster Of UVA President

A series of emails between the Rector and Vice Rector of the UVA Board provide insight into their rationale for firing the president.  One of their concerns was that UVA was falling behind in the movement towards online education.  The Rector and Vice Rector exchanged emails, with links to articles in the press, about the efforts by several universities to develop platforms for online courses.  There was also a reference to the Darden School which is part of UVA but self supporting.  Darden specializes in executive education programs. Executives who attend these programs are funded by their sponsoring firms. The programs are expensive and do not require the overhead of a university.  The Rectors seem to like the concept of a public university that does not require the use of public funds.

It is pretty clear the Rectors believe that they know more about the issues of online education than the UVA administration.  They got their information from reading a couple of laudatory articles in the press.  This made them better informed than university administrators, who are certainly better informed about the issues than the Rectors.  The Rectors also believe that they are more knowledgeable about the "crisis in higher education".  One can read David Brooks, George Will, Robert Samuelson and other conservative pundits who define the "crisis".  It is part of a general conservative effort to cut public spending on social programs.  It is largely a manufactured crisis that leverages the decline in tax revenues that result from the recession and our slow recovery.

I devoted more time to this issue than it would have deserved if it were an isolated event.  I view the UVA incident as a dangerous intrusion of politically motivated Board members on the operation of a complex organization that they do not understand.  Their anxiety about the crisis in higher education is largely a manufactured anxiety that is being repeated in other other states across the nation.  The willingness of the Rectors to take the drastic step of firing a popular president suggests that the conservative movement is making progress in its efforts to defund public education.