The UVA Board of Visitors
Who are these people that ousted Teresa Sullivan? The Post has a nice graphic. Every single member is a businessperson. Including Pat Robertson’s son. Not a single seat is reserved for someone with a different background. It’s quite clear–give a bunch of money to the governor, be rewarded with a seat on the University Board of Visitors. And for these people, the humanities have zero value. Says The Athenaeum:
I notice that every single member of the university’s Board of Visitors is a business person. This is true whether the member was appointed by Kaine or McDonnell. What is happening at Charlottesville appears to be part of a state wide effort to convert the state’s many fine colleges and universities into trade schools to support industry and the business community generally. The process has had a certain elegant simplicity Wealthy business people give a lot of money. They then are appointed to governing boards. Afer that they begin to agitate for “pragmatic” reforms. This generally means attacks on the Humanities. These are deemed to be “dreaming of the past” rather than studies in which critical, independent thinking is nurtured and fed on the experence of mankind. .English departments are converted into institutions that de-emphasize literature and teach rhetoric (reading, writing and public speaking). History and Philosophy are marginalized. If such desiderata are fulfilled, then the money continues to flow in. In short the business community and the moneyed class are buying the universities just as the same people are buying political power with the help of the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision.
Other than Sullivan not doing enough to eviscerate the humanities, it’s pretty easy to see why this Board of Hacks wouldn’t like Teresa Sullivan. Before she became president of UVA, what was Sullivan best known for? Possibly for co-authoring this book with one Elizabeth Warren. H/T to Davis X. Machina on this.
I’m certainly not saying that there was some right-wing conspiracy where getting rid of someone who wrote a book with Elizabeth Warren played a role. Rather, publications like this means that for the capitalist extremists on the Board of Visitors, Sullivan is one of us academics who can’t be trusted. Remember that conservatives have been attacking the academy for years because it was the one spot in American life they did not control. They control the media, the churches, the sporting world, much of K-12 education, the airwaves, etc. It’s just Hollywood and the academy and Hollywood doesn’t actually make liberal movies that people watch. Turning the academy into a conservative training ground is part of the point here; if they can teach young people that there is no alternative to fundamentalist capitalism, if they can get rid of the courses and majors that teach critical thinking and skills not directly applicable to the marketplace, then conservatives have won a huge victory.
Now it does seem increasingly likely that the coup will fail. The Board is presently paralyzed and with the campus in an uproar, it’s hard to see how the coup leaders move forward. Governor Bob McDonnell is telling the Board to either resolve the problem or he will remove all of them, but given that this is McDonnell, that would only mean a more intransigent BoV to replace them. The money line in this story about McDonnell’s threat is here: “He derided “vitriolic comments” directed at Dragas, as well as vandalism on the campus and threats to refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the interim president.” However, it will be difficult to resolve this in any way that doesn’t lead to Sullivan’s return.
But even if Sullivan does return, it is only a small loss for the capitalists. They are doing this at every state school across the country. Most of the time, they can slash funding for the humanities and push colleges and universities toward serving as capitalist training camps without even the slightest peep of public notice. As the United States goes through its own Shock Doctrine, capitalist-caused crises to the economy become excuses to give more power to the capitalists at the expense of working people. This same dynamic goes for the universities–as capitalist anti-tax fervor dries up state budgets, states disinvest from higher education, giving capitalists complete control over universities. People accept it because they either believe the Capitalists Know Best rhetoric or they don’t see any other option and feel defeated and hopeless.
That’s why I said earlier that we are all the University of Virginia. Because what’s happening there is happening at every public school I’ve ever been associated with–the University of Oregon, University of Tennessee, University of New Mexico, and University of Rhode Island. And virtually every other school as well. Capitalists can fight a war on public higher education on thousands of fronts at once so a loss in Charlottesville is only a small defeat in their perfidious campaign.
The new Schoolmen are in charge. Commercium, scientārum regina.
All that is, can be bought and sold. All that cannont be bought and sold, is not.
Ah, I an see it now – an entire country with nothing but DeVry Universities and DeVry Institutes of Technology.
The I of T’s, for the riff-raff.
And, as for the Universities, some will be more prestigious than others.
The more bucks the family has, the easier the diploma will be to obtain, the more expensive the sheepskin, and the gaudier the Latin inscription – which no one will know how to read.
Humanities, languages (especially those not most commonly used for business), philosophy, social sciences, and environmental sciences, among others, will all be taught either in some internet format, if still legal, or else, be taught in secret gatherings of like-minded heretics, passing on what they know like the people in “Fahrenheit 451.”
Our future’s so bright, we’re gonna need searchlights…
One problem is that liberals in academia often write liberal articles and books that people don’t read. You refer to Hollywood’s failure on that ground (“Hollywood doesn’t actually make liberal movies that people watch.”). As far as I can tell, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have done a much better job presenting a vision of liberalism that appeals to the masses. That’s one of many reasons that certain types of social movements (gay rights, feminism, to a lesser extent racial integration, etc.) seem to be making more progress than the class-based critiques of many academics. So, as a liberal, I’d worry more about losing Hollywood than Academia (though, of course, I’d prefer not to lose either).
Moreover, a lot of academics are not really liberal, critical thinkers. Many of them are small “c” conservative, even if they vote for Democrats. Indeed, to get ahead in academia today often requires an attitude of being career-minded and play-by-the-rules. Such people hardly flip on a dime and become completely free thinkers (I struggle with this myself). Academia’s hierarchical nature also doesn’t encourage it. Finally, in many disciplines, shoddy Neoliberalism and conservatism thrive (economics, law, etc.).
That’s an interesting definition of “many.”
UVa is going about this all wrong. They should have just followed FSU’s lead and started selling departments to billionaire “libertarians” directly.
Much more efficient that way.
The problem is that George Mason already exists in Virginia.
Then the competition should make the race to the bottom that much more efficient! Hah! A market solution to that problem. Where’s my check?
Shorter McDonnell: “On the one hand, the President was removed in a secretive and improper fashion by a cabal on the Board of Visitors led by Helen Dragas. On the other hand, some people subsequently said some unkind things about Helen Dragas. To these people I say: stop being so divisive and uncivil.”
The WaPo editorial board must have been pissing their pants with delight.
Well its good to give them a reason other than fear, now and again
I think it’s very important to remember that the “capitalist extremists” (an excellent description, Erik) who went after Sullivan included both Democratic and Republican appointees to the BoV (its current membership are half appointees of former Democratic Governor Tim Kaine and half appointees of current GOP Governor Bob McDonnell). Those pushing our universities in this direction today include not simply the conservative enemies of higher education (who, as you say, have been at it for decades), but also its neoliberal “friends,” who honestly want to increase access to higher education, but who view higher ed purely as a financial proposition, a method for students to invest time and money in their future earning potential.
No question–certainly the capitalist war on the university is not just a Republican war, though it may be fought with Republican values.
It is a class war issue, not an ideological one.
Class war issues are ideological issues.
I should have clarified that it is not a “liberal”/”conservative” issue as much as a class issue.
UVA is not exactly providing an education for the unwashed masses of the commonwealth. Low income students have been underrepresented since the mid-90s and the percentage of students on Pell grants was below ten for most of the past decade. UVA is probably the worst state flagship in this regard generally ranking last in percentage of Pell grant recipients out of the 32 or so public universities with an endowment over $500M.
It would be fascinating to see this Board of Visitors in historical perspective. How many wealthy businesspeople were serving on the BoV ten years ago? Twenty? Thirty? etc.
I ask in part because politically appointed governing boards have a long history (at least elsewhere in the country) of meddling in the affairs of universities in ways generally hostile to higher education. To take two examples off the top of my head:
1) Shortly after Oklahoma achieved statehood, our first governor appointed a board of regents that purged the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, ostensibly for their immorality (e.g. smoking, drinking, and dancing…I’m not making this up you know), but in fact because they wanted to higher some of their fundamentalist friends to replace them. Among the fired faculty was OU’s first football coach and future Pulitzer Prize winner Vernon Parrington. The whole, ugly incident is covered in great detail in David Levy’s history of the University of Oklahoma.
2) The governing board of UT Austin has a long history of clashing with faculty and on-campus leadership. The 1950s and ’60s editions of these battles are discussed in Doug Rossinow’s excellent book about the New Left in Austin, The Politics of Authenticity.
The recent history of Texas A&M is also a prime example.
It’s not just A&M. During the last gubernatorial election, two Texas Tech regents were fired because they were going to vote for Rick Perry’s opponent. It’s pretty much accepted by now that regents in Texas aren’t working for their universities — they’re working for Perry.
OU’s loss. UW’s gain.
The Board of Regents of my undergraduate alma mater is actually elected statewide, and they run on partisan ballots. I haven’t delved into the history of the Regents at all, but it would be interesting to see if there’s a difference between the way an elected board conducts running a university and the way an appointed board does.
With an elected board there’s an excellent chance you wind up with this guy.
True enough, although it appears that, in the case of Virginia at least, an appointed board can give you the same thing, but a more genteel version of it.
I think it’s a bit like electing vs. appointing judges. Hard to say which is least unsatisfactory.
My sense is that the BOV has always been largely or entirely composed of wealthy businesspeople. But until a decade or so ago there was a culture of genteel philanthropy and, well, culture that protected the University. After you’d made your fortune strip-mining coal you got an honorific spot on the BOV, showed up a couple times a year to approve things and drink bourbon, and gave back by endowing chairs of Cuneiform Studies and the like. Heywood Fralin (a former Rector and the one ‘Nay’ vote at the last meeting) is a holdover from those days. But now we live in a world of Dragases.
If reinstated, I’m wondering how effective Sullivan could be when the Board of Visitors (or, at least, a cabal that controls the Board) has shown itself to be hostile to her. The damage has already been done.
That’s a good question. Sullivan will have a lot of public goodwill on her side and the support of faculty so if she chooses to keep the Board on its heels, I think she could have success. That said, whether she’d actually do that or not, I don’t know.
You call them businesspeople, but how many of these individuals have actually built a large business? Several are investors/financiers, Dragas inherited a family firm, but did any of them have responsibility for a large business that was intended to be run for the long term? (Real estate development sure doesn’t count.) Maybe Nau? I’m no fan of mindless application of business models to the university, but what we have here is something worse–a bunch of people applying what they think are business methods to universities, but in fact are just aping the worst of shallow business-school-speak (“strategic dynamism”?).
My thoughts exactly; I’m inclined to see them as ideological zealots rather than cynical class warriors (not that there is much difference in the end).
These are deemed to be “dreaming of the past” rather than studies in which critical, independent thinking is nurtured and fed on the experence of mankind.
No, these are called “dreaming of the past” to denigrate them. I think the a large portion of these plutocrats are well aware of the role of the humanities and other despised programs in teaching critical and analytical thinking. That is exactly why they hate them so much.
I haven’t seen anyone tie the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) – a Koch-funded sibling of ALEC – to this coup, but the BOV’s first statement was lifted almost word-for-word from sections of ACTA’s publications.
They even have a pamphlet singling out German and classics for elimination – one of the chief complaints of Helen Dragas and her conspirators.
Do you have links to this stuff?
I don’t have links to those specifics. I hope BPM does. But ACTA wrote an open letter to the Board of Visitors which is linked prominently on the front page of ACTA’s website, and it concludes as follows:
ACTA appears to be ALEC for university boards.
Very interesting stuff. Thanks. Anyone can add to this, I’d appreciate it for a follow-up post in between writing this book review and going through decades worth of union newspapers.
From their Wikipedia entry:
It doesn’t get any more bipartisan than having Joe Lieberman as a founder and Ed Meese as a director. No, seriously. It doesn’t.
Their January report on higher education in Virginia is available here. (Can’t link directly; opening the PDF crashes my browser.) Apparently declining state support doesn’t even merit a direct mention as a cause of tuition increases, and anyway our fine governor is TOTALLY COMMITTED to increasing funding for the system, so it must be the schools’ fault.
I’ll get something to you – kiddo just woke up from his nap.
Yup, they showed up today, see, “Local Opinions” in the Metro section of WaPo for a piece by Anne Neal of ACTA. Her key point seemed to be that UVA should emulate the University of Missouri!
Like George Mason, UV is a center of public choice theory, the general drift of which is to claim that government money is usually wrongly and undemocratically spend. So state universities are just parasites of the poor taxpayer.
Why tax a struggling janitor to subsidize an elite classicist studying bisexual authors from two thousand years ago?
Yes, when I was at U.Va. in the mid- to late-’90s the Econ Department was very right wing. Don’t know if it’s changed at all, but back then the profs I had thought Friedman was God and Keynes was a retard whose work made witchcraft look respectable.
Two additional things:
First, I think part of this is that we actually started educating entrepreneurs. Think about the great universities founded or put on the map by capitalists in the past: Chicago, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon. The robber barons who founded these outfits – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford – didn’t even graduate high school, much less college. Consequently, they had a tremendous respect for book learning and a tremendous tolerance for luftmenshen of all kinds. Now, unfortunately, we have boards made up largely of people with advanced degrees in business administration and law. This has convinced them – especially the lawyers – that they either a) know something about higher education, b) can get up to speed on professional issues quickly, or c) both. Unintended consequences strike again.
Second, it is remarkable that there are attorneys on the BOV and they sat there through the whole episode. I’m married to a lawyer and I’ve never met anyone who has a better ear to the ground about public relations issues then her. Any lawyer worth her salt who got wind of this would have been on Dragas like a duck on a junebug about the possible consequences. It’s revealing that the cabal she put together was only made up of corporals of industry – “investors”, real estate, act. – and didn’t include anybody who had worked with major corporations. And, let’s face it, if Dragas had consulted, say, the McQuire Woods partner on the BOV, the strategy they used to get rid of Sullivan would have been much more subtle and much harder to resist. Luckily for everybody concerned about higher education in the US, she didn’t and the veil of corporate control was completely exposed.
You can see why Pat Robertson’s son would be averse to this. It’s bad for his business operation of fleecing gullible and ignorant superstitious people.
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/116
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excerpt:
Theory and Practice of Higher-Ed Administration
The single most important thing you can do to educate yourself about the intentions of higher-education administration is to read the discourse of higher-ed administrators themselves. Their self-description of their aims is far scarier than anything I can tell you about them.
The best one-volume source for administrator-think is the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) Reader, Organization and Governance in Higher Education, edited by Christopher M. Brown. The 5th edition (2000) is available used. The 6th edition from Pearson Custom Publishing is promised for this year (2008), but is not currently available.
The best one-volume discussion of the role of management theory in U.S. intellectual life is the indispensable Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. For a contrasting view, see Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.
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Thanks, Erik, for mentioning the Sullivan book and also Shock Doctrine. What the States are doing to unions is typical SD, or the “Never fail to take advantage of a crisis” syndrome.
How many of these reductions in union pensions and health care will be rescinded when the economy recovers?
Re: Teresa Sullivan’s collaboration with Elizabeth Warren. Apparently, this was the subject of a Zombie Andrew Breitbart “investigation” into never-proven, actually non-existent 22 year old academic fraud on the part of Warren. Some clown at Breitbart tried to get in on the whole UVA thing by “speculating” that Sullivan might have been willing to resign without a fight because she feared the coming Breitbart-bomb….too funny. I won’t provide the Breitbart link because. yuk, but I learned of it from the recent Slate article by UVA Prof Siva Vaidheyanathan (sp?).
Am I the only one who finds it ironic to call teaching rhetoric as an attack on the humanities?
I see daily attacks on “useless majors” that I throughly disagree with. But, rhetoric was one of the liberal arts taught in the medieval university. It has always been one of the humanities. Find a better argument.
actually it’s not much of a loss for the capitalists or the privatizers.
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2012/06/invisibility-of-corporatization-on.html