<story><title>UVA Computer Science professor resigns over incompetence of board</title><url>https://gist.github.com/2955870</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomasien</author><text>Brief description of what&apos;s happening: a bit over 2 years ago, Teressa Sullivan was appointed the first woman president in the history of UVa, a school that was all male until the 70&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, last week she was forced to resign because of a &quot;philosophical difference&quot; 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&apos;s because they wanted &quot;radical&quot; change to the future plans of the University, not incremental change.&lt;p&gt;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&apos;s vision or whatever, I find a lot of the Jefferson talk to be crap but let&apos;s take it for what it is for now).&lt;p&gt;There have been protests, yada yada yada everybody is pissed and people are starting to quit.&lt;p&gt;This is a big damn deal that&apos;s only getting worse, and although I&apos;m a UVa alum who for some reason doesn&apos;t really care, I suggest taking a look at this if you&apos;re interested in the bs that can go on at the ivory tower institutions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_delirium</author><text>A fundamental problem is that university boards have an increasing disconnect from anything to do with merit, and a close enough connect to donating money (in two ways) that it&apos;s pretty close to just buying a seat. They&apos;re mostly made up some mixture of: 1) large donors to the university, who&apos;re appointed to maintain good relations, encourage future donations, etc.; and 2) for public universities, large &lt;i&gt;political&lt;/i&gt; donors, who&apos;re appointed by governors, sort of in the way that ambassadorships often go to big political donors.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;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&apos;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 &quot;elder statesman&quot; type figure, e.g. a former governor or Congressman.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;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 &quot;former CEO of Paramount Pictures&quot; and &quot;husband of Dianne Feinstein&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>UVA Computer Science professor resigns over incompetence of board</title><url>https://gist.github.com/2955870</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomasien</author><text>Brief description of what&apos;s happening: a bit over 2 years ago, Teressa Sullivan was appointed the first woman president in the history of UVa, a school that was all male until the 70&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, last week she was forced to resign because of a &quot;philosophical difference&quot; 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&apos;s because they wanted &quot;radical&quot; change to the future plans of the University, not incremental change.&lt;p&gt;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&apos;s vision or whatever, I find a lot of the Jefferson talk to be crap but let&apos;s take it for what it is for now).&lt;p&gt;There have been protests, yada yada yada everybody is pissed and people are starting to quit.&lt;p&gt;This is a big damn deal that&apos;s only getting worse, and although I&apos;m a UVa alum who for some reason doesn&apos;t really care, I suggest taking a look at this if you&apos;re interested in the bs that can go on at the ivory tower institutions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmfrk</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a
   bunch of Darden MBA&apos;s because they wanted &quot;radical&quot; change
   to the future plans of the University, not incremental
   change.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Which, as I recall, was revealed in some seriously mustache-twirling e-mails that the main orchestrator had used the &lt;i&gt;Reply All&lt;/i&gt; feature for or something to that extent. I can&apos;t remember which article I read this in, but this has all the elements of &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; most interesting and scandalous affair in academia this year.</text></comment>