Helen Dragas disparages without disparaging

Helen Dragas is an amazing piece of work.  She’s the rector of the Board of Visitors that forced UVA president Teresa Sullivan to resign.  A new hearing to potentially reinstate Sullivan is scheduled for Tuesday but leading up to it, Dragas is digging in her heels about the rightness of the board’s original decision.

Yesterday, she released a statement explaining why the board forced Sullivan to resign.  It turned out not to have been written by her.  The geeks unpacked the electronic copy to discover that some hack at the PR firm Hill and Knowlton actually wrote it.  Then the professors weighed in and picked it apart.  Jeez, you do not want to get on a Wahoo’s shit list.  They’re having a field day.

Governor McDonnell laid down an ultimatum: get this issue under control by Tuesday or I will ask for the resignations of the whole board.  I’m not sure this works in UVA’s favor though because McDonnell is a Republican and half of the board members were appointed by Tim Kaine, the previous governor who is a Democrat.  That includes Helen Dragas.  The board actions look like they cross party lines, however.  What the board members seem to have in common is that most of them are in the 1%.  To them, party distinctions are irrelevant.  They’re used to getting their own way.

In response to McDonnell’s ultimatum, Dragas fires back a nasty little ditty of her own.  Here are the money quotes:

I also agree with him on the importance of providing clear explanations of our actions, as I aimed to do in my statement yesterday, while being mindful of the constraints of the confidentiality of personnel matters and the non-disparagement agreements in the President’s contract.

I appreciate the Governor’s leadership in affirming the importance of Board governance, and that we alone are appointed to make these decisions on behalf of the University, free of influence from outside political, personal or media pressure.

I look forward to a respectful and dignified meeting on Tuesday, and to an important discussion of the implications of any decision we make on the ability of future Boards to lead the University.”

Let’s leave aside the sheer chutzpah required to tell the Governor to BTFU, what Helen appears to be saying here is roughly the equivalent of “I am prohibited by law from telling you that Teresa Sullivan is a goat fucker.  If I said that, that would be disparagement.  And anyway, that information is confidential.”

I know I should be blogging about the election or the new, incredibly boneheaded and damaging “Fast and Furious” scandal that provoked Obama to claim executive privilege. That scandal seems to have depressed even Jon Stewart.  But this event at UVA is riveting because it is a microcosm of what is happening everywhere in this country, an easy to digest story of  overreach by the privileged for mysterious reasons that may or may not have to do with making money. It’s happening at a historic university, founded by one of the most famous founding fathers who penned the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson knew all about the motto Sic Semper Tyrannis. There is a lot of Americana and symbolism. The 1% have been doing this very same thing to this country for decades now to different segments of our economy and society.  And the privileged class started crossing party lines to take over the Democratic party in 2007 as well.  But never mind that right now.

What is it that drives Dragas?  There’s a timeline convergence happening in July where the board members are up for renewal.  It doesn’t look like Dragas will be reappointed*.  Is Dragas taking one for the team?  Is she trying to accomplish something before her term is up? Is something big at stake here for her to assert the board’s sovereignty?  Is that why she won’t resign?  Her statement of reasons why Sullivan was “fired” from yesterday seems to be superceded by the statement from tonight where she implies that there’s a blot on Sullivan’s permanent record.  What is this all about? There must be a strategy, because I can’t believe someone would go this far out on a limb without one.  Maybe it only appears to be a Komenesque self-destructive event.

And what are we to make of Sullivan’s confidence?  If she’s been fucking goats, she doesn’t seem to mind anyone finding out about it.

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*Update: @cvillnewscom tweets that a reliable source in the Governor’s office says that Dragas will be reappointed.  If true, the board is determined to get its way and this is going to be a very ugly power struggle.

I saw this quote on twitter in a tweet on #UVA:

“When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.”

A bit of advice from a pharma researcher to UVA

You have been placed on the frontline of a global power struggle.  It’s between a bunch of rich people who are used to having their own way and YOU.

Pharma researchers have seen this crap played out for the last 20 years.  For us, it was one merger and acquisition after another.  Some bright young thing from Wharton gets it into his head that putting two pharmas together would be funner than leaving them alone.  It’s all about “synergy” or “strategic reinforcement of core competencies” or “paradigm shifts”.  So, a merger is forced on the labs and for the next two years, no one knows what the f&*( is going on, no work gets done and the best people leave while the local management wave their dicks at one another.  Then come the consultants who walk into a dysfunctional post merger landscape and say, “It’s dysfunctional”.  No shit, sherlock.  How about leaving us alone for awhile until things settle down?  Nope, the reengineering will go forward.  And with each iteration of restructuring, power gets more centralized.  This is a very interesting phenomenon because the consultants and executives at TownHall meetings *say* they want to promote decision making at a local level but the truth is that everyone is so scared to death of losing their jobs that they don’t dare challenge a decision made by anyone higher up. Yes men (and it’s ALWAYS men) get promoted.  Good managers and smart people go away. It happens so often that it must be deliberate.

It has occurred to me that sometime during the late 90’s, we labrats should have picked up our ehrlenmeyer flasks and walked out in a massive protest.  We should have raised hell, although it is even hard for me to envision what that might look like.  We should have gotten their attention and drawn a line in the sand and organized a professional organization with licensing and employment standards.  We should have made it very clear that we were not going to be pushed around anymore because it was destroying research and research is what we live for.

We didn’t.  Instead, we let the business people run research into the ground and fire off memos in bizspeak and plunder the research budget and continue to cater to the executives in the corner offices at the expense of the geeks in the labs.  This country will be paying for that for generations to come.

UVA is now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that university founded by T.J. himself and dedicated to the proposition of respect and reverence for the liberal arts can long endure.  I’m here to tell you that if Helen Dragas hasn’t been forced to resign yet you are losing.  It doesn’t matter at this point if Teresa Sullivan is coming back.  She may be a great administrator but this fight is not about her anymore.  It is about how your future is being compromised by the usurpation of your university by a bunch of rich people who think that their success in business makes them smarter and more equal than you are.  If you let UVA go under without a fight, similar power struggles will happen at other schools.  And they too will go down like dominos.  Before you know it, you will be run by a corporate president who will look after the shareholders’ needs.  There will be a marketing department who will design your curriculum based on what’s hot this year.  Your faculty will have to compete for their jobs and will spend (even) more time undermining each other at your expense.  And the cost of everything will go up.  It will go into some fund that will be used to increase the value of the endowment or take risks in Malaysia on some upcoming business initiative.

You have got to scare the Board of Visitors, the governor and all of the alumni of UVA.  You’ve got to be bold, dramatic and push the envelope (without destroying any property or injuring people of course).  The interim president should be expected to ask you to calm down, that your actions will only lead to more disruption and damage to the university’s reputation.

This is a lie and should be disregarded.  The more you fight for the university and the ouster of the interfering rich donors, the better off your university will be.  Maybe it will be poorer but you don’t know that for sure yet.  You need to challenge the conventional wisdom that says that business people know how to manage best.

Continue to demand the ouster of Dragas and anyone else who helped her.  Do not let up until you get what you want.  Do not be dragged into negotiations.  They are merely a stalling tactic meant to deprive you of momentum and force.  Set up some barricades, camp out on the commons, and if you don’t get what you want, dematriculate.  Yep, just withdraw from your courses, get your money back and tell the university you won’t reenroll until your demands are met.

What is happening to you now is something the research industry, the Democratic party, the public unions and just about every other sector of society has had to put up with in the past 2 decades.  It is the gradual creep of authoritarianism promoted by people who have power and expect that you will just go along with anything they demand.  They think that you have been trained to be complacent and yielding.  Well, they’ve had so much success everywhere else, why wouldn’t they think that?  Now it’s your turn.  Learn from the rest of us and don’t make it easy for them.  Make this a battle they never want to engage again.

Good luck.

Here’s a video of last night’s action at UVA:

UVA disaster: About those online classes

It’s kind of strange when there’s something in the news that you actually know something about.  I’m talking about the online classes that were the underlying reason why UVA president Teresa Sullivan was fired.  In truth, it’s not the classes themselves that did her in.  It was the fact that she stood in the way of progress making a ton of money for prospective investors and rectors on the board of visitors who want to make UVA into a business that offers academic goods and services.

The best explanation for what might have happened is by Anne-Marie Angelo, UVA alum and current PhD candidate in History at Duke.  (H/T Lambert at Corrente)

But let’s talk about those online classes for a second.  As many of you may know, Brooke takes her AP English courses through Stanford’s Online High School.  Stanford runs their OHS classes through an application called Saba Centra. It uses another program called eCollege as well but Centra is how the online classes are distributed. I was skeptical at first how this was going to work but it turns out that it is very good.  The class is held in real time with high school students from all over the world.  The app initially didn’t work on a Mac but they’ve straightened that out in the past year.  Through Centra, the teacher can call on students.  He/She can ask some of them to write short responses to questions while she is discussing the day’s material with other students.  Students can respond to each other, chat and give “applause” feedback.  The interface is loaded with features.  It truly is an interactive experience and I’ve often passed by the basement door to hear her talking to her teacher as if she were in an actual classroom.  Classroom attendance is strict.  You can only miss a class for technical reasons or your grandmother died.  If you’re sick, well, you’re at home soooo, what are you doing with your time??  In addition to the live classroom experience, the teacher can also provide supplementary material, like videos, that can be viewed through Centra.  Students can view this material at their convenience within a given timeframe but if it’s part of an assignment, attendance will be recorded and graded.

I credit Stanford OHS for getting Brooke back on level and thoroughly challenged.  The class material is not easy for a high school student.  The course follows the Stanford University schedule so Brook’s course ended in May, leaving her time to finish up her other online courses which are not taken through Stanford.  These two classes are American History and Precalc and are offered through a for profit curriculum provider.  The application it uses is not as complete as Stanford’s.  The classes are prerecorded and you go at your own pace.  The interface is kludgy and it’s a bit like studying for your written driver’s exam.  If you don’t answer the questions exactly as they have been spelled out in the lesson, you can’t go forward, even if you disagree with the answer or find the question poorly worded.  The experience is much more pedantic, less lively, less personal.  It’s something you want to get over with, not something to look forward to.

So, there are good online packages, like Stanford’s, which should be the current working model to be tweaked and adjusted for course material, subject and size of class, and there are not so good online packages.  But the thing that makes Stanford’s OHS stand out is the quality of the faculty.  This year, Brooke’s teacher was a professor of English who had scored AP English essays at one point in her career.  Last year’s teacher was equally well qualified.  I’ve asked Brooke several times if she thinks the classes are worth the outrageous price tag and she always looks like she would be bereft without them.  What you are paying for in the end is the faculty and the program.  Stanford has a lot of experience working with exceptional learners and the way it uses Centra and has set up these classes reflects that experience.

The bottom line is that you can’t just rush into these things.  It takes time to research the online setup, choose materials, create supplementary material and train staff to get the best possible experience.  Of course, there is no substitute for the ambience of a college or university where you can spend time with people in your classes who share your interests and with whom you can talk about issues that are important to you.  Taking an online class or two is fine but you really need to be there to transform yourself and learn how to learn.

So, I sympathize with Teresa Sullivan who calls herself an incrementalist.  In my opinion, that is exactly the approach that is needed when it comes to carefully and effectively implementing an online class so that the student and college gets the most value from it.  Just buying a package off the shelf and running a few training seminars for the staff is just so corporate.  What comes along with that will be a behemoth IT department and a standard, one-size-fits-all interface that will frustrate all but the most dedicated hackers.  You know how I know this?  It was in the way in which the forced resignation was handled.  No one in the faculty was consulted and it was done quickly, without much thought to fallout or repercussions for the university’s reputation.  The Board of Visitors want to make money and that means skimping on the interface, implementation and preparation steps so that a lowest common denominator image can be rolled out before the fall classes start.  That’s probably why university professor Bill Wulf resigned yesterday.  He knew that the minute you turn your expertise over to a corporate standard, you lose all control over it and any catastrophes that follow.  Everything becomes centralized and making changes or handling problems becomes very difficult. Ask anyone who’s every worked in corporate research.  The management class seems determined to get in the way of true progress.

Now, what could Teresa Sullivan have done differently to save her job?  Well, she *could* have taken a serious look at the various schools and maybe scaled some of them back.  I would have started with the Darden School of Business at UVA.  One wonders if Jefferson would have approved of a business school as being sufficiently rigorous enough for UVAs standards.  Business management isn’t really a science, it’s fairly artless and it is anything but humane.  Everything I’ve read about business curriculum is that it tends to be trendy, appealing to the business class that has the attention span of a magpie distracted by shiny objects. It’s also light on actual content, much of it not well validated, except for the math, economics and accounting.  Couldn’t you just roll that stuff into the economics department or send the future spreadsheet jockeys to an accounting program?  Or she could have resolved to review the business program to make sure we aren’t graduating too many students who have no background in the industries that they will be managing.   I know that if Sullivan had done something like that, those of us who have been laid off from our corporate research positions would have been eternally grateful.  And given how unethically the MBAs have lead the global economy off a cliff, she might have prevented even more cocky Brooke’s Brother’s assholes from ruining the world.  She could have been a hero.

But that’s all water under the bridge now.  What’s coming up is finding a permanent replacement for Sullivan. And I have just the right guy for the job!  That’s right, why not just recruit Barack Obama?  There’s a good chance he’s going to lose anyway once the working class base he blew off in 2008 votes in November.  There’s not a damn thing a hipster creative class person can do about that if Obama insists on running.  And he’s got the right mindset.  He’s a good fundraiser, he likes schmoozing with donors, who he will give his full attention to later, and he’s not terribly sympathetic to labor, which makes it all the easier for the Board of Visitors to dynamically strategize how to “harmonize” their benefits.  (When you see “harmonize” in the company bulletins, update your CV)  Besides, Obama is all about Change!™  It’s a match made in heaven.  Solve two problems at once: hire Obama as the president of UVA and get a real Democrat to run in his place in November.

Update: Siva Vaidhynathan, professor of media studies at UVA gave an interview this afternoon that sounds eerily like my post.  It’s like some kind of Vulcan mind meld.  Cue the Twlight Zone theme.  Here it is in its entirety, about 30 minutes.