UVA Computer Science professor resigns over incompetence of board
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
Suddenly, last week she was forced to resign because of a "philosophical difference" with the Board of Visitors, a group that is appointed by the state of oversee University Affairs and top level hirings. It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change to the future plans of the University, not incremental change.
The students and faculty are outraged because this was done in secret behind closed doors, which is very much contrary to the way things are typically done at UVa (because of Jefferson's vision or whatever, I find a lot of the Jefferson talk to be crap but let's take it for what it is for now).
There have been protests, yada yada yada everybody is pissed and people are starting to quit.
This is a big damn deal that's only getting worse, and although I'm a UVa alum who for some reason doesn't really care, I suggest taking a look at this if you're interested in the bs that can go on at the ivory tower institutions
It's admittedly long been common for particularly large donors to be flattered a bit with some role, but over the past 10-20 years this seems to have gone from being a few members of the board, to being almost all of them, with very few members appointed primarily because of non-donation-related merit, like someone thinking they're actually good candidates for overseeing an academic/research institution. Note the lack of accomplished scientists on the board, for example. In addition, the political appointees seem to have decreased in quality: it was once more common to appoint someone who, while they were from your own party, was a late-career "elder statesman" type figure, e.g. a former governor or Congressman.
It's sadly not a partisan issue, either: if you look at, say, the University of California Board of Regents, you have a nice bipartisan mixture of big Democratic donors (appointed by Democratic governors) and big Republican donors (appointed by Republican governors). Their expertise is... not too relevant seeming, including such credentials as "former CEO of Paramount Pictures" and "husband of Dianne Feinstein".
The main objection that I and most people I've talked to have is that the BOV hasn't given a good reason for its actions. It may very well be that Sullivan deserved to be fired. It may very well be that there needed to be more drastic changes than she was willing to make (although for an appropriate idea of how hard drastic, top down change is at a top University, see my description of faculty consensus above). But without releasing any concrete reason, backed up by publicly available data, and by essentially saying "shut up and trust our judgment", they showed a fundamental disconnect between their idea of acceptable governance and the rest of the university's idea of acceptable governance. For the record, I think that if you look at them as the board of a corporation replacing a CEO, their actions are totally reasonable (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was, in part, how they viewed themselves; this doesn't really say much for their case, though, because that still shows a massive cultural disconnect between them and the university body).
This is huge. This will cause a loss of confidence in UVA if they don't take effective action to recover.
It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a
bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change
to the future plans of the University, not incremental
change.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...
Deleted comment
The fundamental problem, I think, is the Board of Visitors model for running public universities. We had serious problems with this back in 2003 at Virginia Tech (http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/1171/board-of-visitor...).
"The university has a troubling history when it comes to matter race..."
"UVa's racial problem is larger than simply a few isolated incidents of bigotry. ... There is still a discernable "Good Ol' Boy" network that heavily influences the Commonwealth's social, economic and political life and holds UVA up as a crown jewel."
What I posted was not just my opinions, and it was not uninformed. Nevertheless I deleted it because the contents or way it was expressed clearly offended a lot of people here.
Just because a theory is possible does not mean it happened. As I stated before, I have heard no one, on any side, allege discrimination.
"Old Boy" network indeed. The discrimination is not her gender but her provenance (which is that, not being a Darden alum, she is not under the control of the Darden alum pecking order)
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...
Further backstory: the expenditures of the academic division at UVA have increased about 80% since 2001. Enrollment has only increased 9%. In-state tuition has increased about 275%.
I'm not a UVA alum, but I grew up in Virginia, so I care about what happens at UVA. UVA's faculty can wax philosophical all they want about academic freedom and the like, but at the end of the day the explosion in university expenses cannot be ignored. Expenditures on faculty salaries have risen 4-5% per year over the last decade even though enrollment has only grown 0.7% per year and salaries in other sectors have been stagnant.
It's insane that there are 3,300 faculty for a school that has only 21,000 FTE students. I'm a strong supporter of public education and public research, but facilitating this faculty growth at the expense of students is absolutely ridiculous and it's high-time the Board made some cuts.
A vendetta against the humanities perhaps, but economic efficiency? Neither are departments likely to have soaring costs: all you need is a classroom and professor. Lecturers in the classics will probably not even break 50k, while language classes are even cheaper since they're often offloaded to graduate students teaching from standard texts. As long as there are students opting to take those courses, they should be printing money for the university.
So unless there has been gross mismanagement of these departments for decades (aggressive hiring and declining enrollment), it is hard to believe that costs could get out of line. And closing down popular and should-be-profitable classes in order to funnel students to other departments in the name of economic efficiency is a very strange move.
Eliminating teaching a language due to economic reasons is extremely shortsighted. What point is a school if it doesn't actually teach a fairly major language?
Oh wait, no. There are lots of german speakers in the US, but when German companies do business here, they send people who can speak English. Many (most?) US companies send employees to do business in other countries who speak the local language. It doesn't have to be even a fluent level of speech, but the gesture is well received on all ends. It is a general courtesy to at least attempt to have people who speak the language, as it signals other cultural awarenesses and sensitivities.
Suppose the CS dept just did Exchange-server admin 101 - people would complain that it wasn't the proper role of a research university.
It seems that closing marginal depts, rather than just milking them as cash cows is a noble strategy - whatever the rest of the UVa management's actions
And does a university need to teach every subject? Should UVa have (for example) an Oceanography dept? Is there much point in having a one person dept teaching Vulcanology when students would be better going somewhere else that specializes in it?
10 years ago the Netherlands started this process for their entire country. They picked the subjects that their universities did very well at and decided to close all the other research depts. There was no point in having the 100th ranked dept of tropical medicine when students could go somewhere else to learn that and you could use the money to support the worlds top dept in some other topic
Education in foreign languages has far reaching affects on many aspects of life and cognitive abilities - this is a documented fact. The analogy to Exchange is broken in many, many ways. Training on a product only brings some level of competency in that product, as soon as it end-of-lifes, the skill is useless. Learning a language opens many doors, and I don't really see German being end-of-lifed any time soon.
Perhaps every university doesn't need a research oceanography unit, but it sure would be nice if they provided at least a teaching unit or two on those. Or do we just tell the students that would like to know something about it, "screw you, enroll at these other universities too, if you want to learn the basics of that.". I understand that in the Netherlands, this may not be that difficult, it is a small country, but in many places, e.g. the US where UVA is, the college where they kept an oceanography program is probably sever hundred, or even thousands of kilometers away.
Finally, the basics of subject do not need leading experts to teach them well. For low level classes, most people capable of getting a Ph.D and an interest in teaching can cover the material quite well. In fact, there is a whole school of thought (with pretty good evidence) that suggests that experts can't teach novices a subject very well at all. (this is known as the tacit or expert knowledge problem).
In europe where every city has a university this is easier and going to a particular university because of a particular course is more common. There are probably only 4-6 veterinary/dentistry ugrad programs in a country and perhaps half the places will have a medical school.
It's different in the US with in-state tuition, but at some point it is cheaper for the state to just say we aren't teaching Oceanography at U of Iowa - here is a scholarship to UCSD to cover the difference in tuition.
I was thinking about going to graduate school there in 2008, but somehow it was cheaper to take 3 classes remotely at out-of-state rates (at a higher-ranked school, mind you) than to drive 15 miles into town and take 1 class at UVa as an in-state student, so I decided against it.
Edited to add: I later moved to start a PhD program at the other school, stayed here and got a job, so UVa's high tuition indirectly removed me from the pool of people that would work and pay taxes in VA.
The facutly are in revolt because the Board fired the President without warning or stated cause. Eventually, the Board said the cause was that the President, who is in the process of making cuts, was not acting fast enough.
For the other stuff, to add to the budgetary woes, the amount of state money that the public universities in Virginia receive (not just UVA) has dropped significantly.
This says to me that some other source of funding (state subsidy?) has just about disappeared, is that right?
The problem is that expenditure growth is outstripping all non-tuition sources of revenue. E.g. research grants, which account for 1/4 of the budget, have increased only 60%. Endowment income, of course, has not kept pace either given the state of the markets. The University has grown expenditures far faster than its growth in revenues, and has made up for the difference by tripling tuitions.
Honestly, I've never hard a harder time trying to figure out what an HN story was all about.
If the goal was really to keep costs in line, then the first thing to do would be to assess where the cost increases have come. Which programs have seen the biggest cost increases? And, in which of those are the cost increases worth the quality the program brings to the university? Rank the programs by both expense and quality, and cut the programs which have the highest expense relative to their quality.
Beyond this one issue, the faculty is also responding like this because the Board is acting silently, secretively and hastily in making decisions for the university with little to no participation from faculty or administrators, or even information being provided. At this point, after a week of intense scrutiny and questioning, still no one outside the Board knows exactly why President Sullivan was let go.
In 2003 UVA passed a milestone in that more money came from private donors than public funds. Today UVA's budget includes only 8% being covered by the state. The cuts from the state are very real and very keenly felt. UVA is on a tricky path to become a true hybrid private/public school and the questions facing the faculty and the Board are not whether this should happen, but how.
Furthermore, to rebut some of your points a) It's not insane to have 3300 faculty when many of those are working directly on research or employed at the medical center. (I believe this to be the case given that on average about 1000 faculty are employed through the medical center http://www.web.virginia.edu/iaas/data_catalog/institutional/...) b) The expenditures have increased in an attempt at keeping close with peer institutions for salary and other options. Realistically, despite these attempts the faculty at UVA could easily head to competitive private or public schools and make more money, and will probably be doing so in massive numbers over the next few years following this fiasco. c) I am not sure where you are basing your correlation that this faculty growth has happened at the expense of students. If it has been driven by the growth of costs at the Medical Center that is a source of income as well. If it's been driven by academic faculty then its either been funding research to increase the number of accolades achieved by our faculty (thereby increasing the ranking of the school) or it has been hiring more professors or paying teaching faculty more to keep them from leaving, which would seem to directly benefit students.
Also, do you have a source for the 80% growth?
UVA 2011-2012 budget: http://www.virginia.edu/budget/Docs/Budget%20Summaries/2011-... (p. 1, 15)
Note that the 2000-2001 budget lists only the UVA academic division, while p. 1 of the 2011-2012 budget includes the UVA medical center. The academic division is broken down on p. 15 of that budget. Thus the pie charts on p. 1 of the first pdf correspond to the pie charts on p. 15 of the second.
At UVA, sponsored programs (i.e. research grants) make up only a quarter of the budget. Tuition and fees and state appropriations make up almost half. From 2001 to 2012, sponsored program revenues are up 60%, but not nearly enough to cover the 80% increase in expenditures. The other revenue sources haven't kept pace with spending growth either. Of the $590m in additional spending, $276m (or about half) has been supported by tuition increases.
Another way to look at it is that if spending had kept pace with inflation (2.5%) and enrollment growth (0.7%), tuition could have been easily held at 2001 levels. Or, alternatively, had tuition revenues increased to track inflation and enrollment growth, university expenditures could have increased a more modest 50% given the growth in other sources of funding, rather than 80% which was achieved by almost tripling tuition.
UVa, like most research universities, has been quite aggressive in trying to "encourage" faculty to get more grants. If that's successful, overall spending must of course increase proportionately, because the grant requires the recipient to ramp up hiring of program personnel. If that's not a goal, then the university should de-prioritize or even discourage grants, because they mandate spending increases.
A different angle would be to look at breakdowns by department. Which departments have gotten more expensive? My guess is that, as this is likely tied to grant-funded research, it's mostly STEM departments, not the "marginal" humanities.
Half the 80% increase in expenditures was funded by A tripling of tuition. This is not a situation where expenditure increases are being funded mostly by grants.
From the Slate article below: On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, “radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...
Actually kind of a revealing sentence.
The most interesting things I've seen written about debt in the past 20 years comes from an anthropologist, David Graeber. Debt, the first 5000 years. Insights I've never seen from an economist.
I'm curious as to what a sociologist has come up with.
But I've always regarded sociology as undisciplined and people studying it unrigorous. I haven't missed much by those rules of thumb.
A number of Sullivan's books were written with one Elizabeth Warren. When other academics tried to examine their data they came up short. Look her up if you like, but you're more likely to learn more elsewhere.
Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture notes that much recent copyright wrangling is really a return to feudalism. I've been suspecting that it's rather more than just copyright.
The item is: I have never in my life read such civilized and respectful comments from blog or newspaper readers who clearly disagree with each other on an important issue. My goodness! Is this a regular feature of Southern U.S. life?
That being said, I think the people most interested in this news are those with vested interests in Virginia higher education -- alums, donors, etc. -- and that tends to raise the average level of discourse.
That said, I'm surprised the comments are so cordial. I agree with the analysis that the fact that it's mostly UVa alums/students and interested parties commenting contributes to the higher level of discourse.
Know what? They are.
I would encourage you to compare any east coast city against any other. Then I would encourage you to compare an underpopulated area in Maine against an underpopulated area in Tennessee.
The difference between the DC area and all of the other cities in the South is that the DC area was actually the dividing line between the Union and the Confederacy.
Thanks for sharing this. I found it very encouraging.
It seems like the philosophical conflict that drove Sullivan't dismissal maps cleanly to the two styles of programming that pg described in "Programming Bottom-Up":
"It's worth emphasizing that bottom-up design doesn't mean just writing the same program in a different order. When you work bottom-up, you usually end up with a different program. Instead of a single, monolithic program, you will get a larger language with more abstract operators, and a smaller program written in it. Instead of a lintel, you'll get an arch."
My reading of Dragas's and Sullivan's statements to the Board of Visitors is that Dragas wants the University designed as a lintel, and Sullivan as an arch.
Dragas argues that "the Board is the one entity that has a unique vantage point that enables us to oversee the big picture of those interactions, and how the leadership shapes the strategic trajectory of the University." [1] The changes Dragas seems to support (though it's hard to find a clear statement of them anywhere?) would be akin to a major rewrite from scratch. University design by lintel.
Sullivan conversely argues that, "[c]orporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university." She seems to be arguing for incremental changes more akin to aggressive refactoring.
[1] http://cvillenews.com/2012/06/18/dragas-sullivan-statements/
As an alumnus of the University of Virginia in Computer Engineering, kudos Professor Wulf.
You've just given me my #1 salvo against systemd :)
There's really no explanation in the link.
I read the whole thing and have no idea why he's resigning, or even who he is or why I should care.
"Being President was a full time job in DC..." made me chuckle, though.
My wife (Anita Jones) and I are in Computer Science and we both hold the title University Professor — the highest rank at UVa. Of the 3300 faculty at UVa, roughly 13 hold that title.
"I was President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 11 years."
Source?
Sounds like his entire complaint is about the BOV. I don't see anything in the letter that would give you a different impression about the professor's complaint.
It's easy to say that's not what it's about, but practically that what it's about. The university has been increasing faculty expenditures at 4-5% for years in the face of 0.7% increases in enrollment. The state has no more money. Faculty salary expenditures are the biggest line-item in the budget. If academic freedom is to be preserved by opposing the board's cuts, the practical consequence is continued rises in tuition.
And why does an 80% increase in expenditures necessarily lead to a tripling of tuition? Shouldn't tuition go up 80% as well? Unless some other source of funding has disappeared?
100 + 5% = 105 + 5% = 112.5 + 5% = 115.7625 + 5% ... = 179.5856326 - which is approximately an 80% increase over 12 years.
As for the tripling of tuition, let's assume that tuition accounted for 30% of the budget at the start of things above. Even if no other funding sources are decreased (which is not the case with public universities, but let's ignore that for now), increasing the cost of tuition by 79.58%, which is the same amount that the overall budget increased, gets us:
30 + 79.58% = 53.874
So if we still have 70% of the original budget covered, and we add it to our newly increased tuition cost, we get:
53.874 + 70 = 123.874
You can see that there's a bit of a deficit here.
All of that having been said, what is going on at UVa is pretty clearly messed up. Regardless of the changes that need to happen in the budget, which I think everyone can agree on, the BOG way overstepped here.
At the end of the day, the growth in expenses has not been funded by grants, etc. The biggest component of increased revenue has been tuition. A tripling of tuition is what has paid for the 4-5% annual increase in faculty salary expenditures. Opposing faculty cuts is a slap in the face to the students that now pay 1/3 of the university's operating expenses.
In any case, I don't see anyone on either side in this standoff making that tough proposal. Instead, we have the (now-fired) incrementalist looking for across-the-board savings, and the apparently-incompetent Goldman Sachs schemers looking to cut the faculty who don't even account for the past decade's salary increases (humanities, etc.). If someone is actually in favor of making the tough call to fire the 6-figure STEM faculty, they should come out and say so, and lay out their proposal.
One of my beefs with the "decreased state funding" argument is that it presupposes that state funding should keep up with dramatic expansions in University expenditures.
Now, to be fair, state funding has dropped from $166m in 2001 to $140m today. Had it kept pace with enrollment and inflation, it should be about $233m today. State funding keeping pace would have allowed tuition to merely double instead of triple as it has.
On the other hand, all of the cuts have been since 2007. I.e. the greatest recession since the 1930's. During this time, faculty salary expenditures have continued to grow. In an economic environment where nearly everyone's salaries have stagnated or been cut. What should have happened instead is layoffs and salary cuts, as happened in nearly every other field.
Guess who majored in that obscure field of study? Tim O'Reilly, and he talks about how studying Classics helped him decode trends in technology.
I'm an alum of the Engineering school, but I wouldn't have attended UVA were it not for the strength of some of these obscure programs. Monied interests are ruining this institution in the name of profit.
He's not some tenured professor sequestered in the bubble of academia.
Trivia: Mozilla prefer that you abbreviate Firefox "FFx", not "FF".
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-co...
The current leader of any organization is rarely the best choice for making big changes. Unfortunately, it seems Sullivan was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. My guess is the BOV wanted to bring in a hatchet man to make some big cuts of entire departments as opposed to taking a shared sacrifice approach.
I can tell you from my experience in the corporate world "shared sacrifice" rarely works for big organizations facing significant budget cuts. It's usually best to ruthlessly triage the weak parts and leave the strong parts intact instead of trying to cut the strong and weak equally.
However, the BOV handled it poorly.
(Note: I know nothing about the case, really; I am just pointing out that I think you misunderstood the point of the article you linked.)
NEWSFLASH: the Vice-Rector has resigned. Let's hope that Rector Dragass [sic] resigns too.
One of my personal heroes.
Is this real? That's barely proper English, and certainly not something I would submit to an (interim) university President.
Guess you get what you vote for in a guy like McDonald.
Gender had nothing to do with this.