Much has been said and written about the ham-handed firing - and subsequent reinstatement yesterday - of the President of the University of Virginia, Teresa Sullivan. A quick Google search will turn up all manner of sordid details. Here is a good overview article in Slate. Not much is interesting about poor management by an out-of-touch Board of Trustees - it was a mistake, and they have finally realized that, and yesterday they reinstated President Sullivan. Mistakes happen, and so the mere fact of that is uninteresting.
But I think the why of this episode is potentially very interesting, and important to anyone interested in the state of higher education today. The reason for the firing seems to be that President Sullivan was not moving fast enough to implement changes that the Board believed are needed for UVA to stay competitive in the near and long-term future. In particular, it seems from the news reports that two types of changes were sought by the Board: 1) to shut down low-need departments (such as Latin and German), and 2) to embrace and implement teaching more courses online.
President Sullivan's full-throated defense was basically: "Yes, I move slowly. That's the only way to get any sort of change in the academy: through consensus building." She was well-liked and respected by faculty and students, and clearly the Board underestimated that. And they underestimated the disruption such a firing would cause. Once they realized that - and proved themselves to be a Board out-of-touch with the faculty and students of the school they are charged with governing - they reversed their decision and reinstated President Sullivan.
The why of this episode, I think, is found primarily in two converging forces. First, the cost of an elite education has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, without (generally) a noticable increase in quality. Second, in those 20 years, virtually all businesses have been dramatically changed (in one way or another) by the advance of technology. These two forces are very much on the mind of business leaders today - they have to be, since in the first place, they depend on hiring smart people who can afford to work for them, and in the second, if they have not responded to technology-driven changes in their businesses, they don't have that business anymore, and they would not be successful enough to be on the UVA Board of Trustees. I can say with some confidence that discussions centering around these two forces in higher education today are taking place on every Board of Trustees at every institution large enough to have one. So: cutbacks and efficiencies are what they are used to, and what they are looking for to help their institutions survive.
I can't opine about whether the German department at UVA should be sacked. It seems like a terrible idea, frankly, particularly at Mr. Jefferson's University. But I am somewhat sypathetic with two aspects of this. First, we have to accept that things are changing, and address that forthrightly. President Sullivan is right that change in academia happens through consensus, and I'm not arguing that this should change. But sometimes we have our head in the sand, and that's not just bad, it potentially damaging to the institution we hope to save. Second, we continue to be blind to the potential for the judicious application of technology to help address these issues. Some out-of-the-box thinking might help, and some shifting of paradigms.
In a recent interview with Wired magazine, (Professor at NYU, writer of several books about the internet's impact on business) had this to say on the subject:
When I look around at the risk/reward curve for higher education it's grim. We've really gone past the point where raising tuition higher than inflation and then financializing the payment system has become abusive.... Plainly, Universities are the kind of institutions that are ripe for pretty radical reconsideration. Probably because the founding story of many institutions and particularly ones that we think of as kind of original avatars of American higher education was 'notable gentleman X donated their library.' Right? So literally just access to written material became an important enough gesture that you would organize a University around it. And whatever it is people need more of today, it ain't access to written material.
That's some pretty sharp talk (full interview here), but Shirky has a strong track record over a decade of predicting internet-related forces creating change, and I can recommend his books. And he is by far not the only commentator making the same arguments about higher education. It seems wise to prepare for the impending change, rather than stand pat and hope it passes by. That approach worked for the recording industry, right? Seriously, if the German department at UVA wants to reach more students, they could fairly simply do that by making some of their teaching available online, for example. Hanging on to old paradigms: "Oh, I must only have face-to-face time with my students to teach effectively" is status quo talk. It is also not good teaching in my view, because I believe good teaching partly involves being open to new methods and new approaches throughout one's teaching career. If that is what President Sullivan was defending (which I doubt) I might be sypathetic to the Board's impatience, although I deplore its underhanded methods.
Yesterday's NYTimes had an interesting Op-Ed piece on the subject by Jeff Selingo, Executive Director of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, he argues in favor of lowering costs of education by using technology for better learning outcomes. I recommend it as a concise statement of what is needed to help make this situation better.
Of course, much of what I have written here applies to legal education as much as it does to UVA. And the argument Selingo makes in his Op-Ed is the argument I made (for law schools) in my Law School 2.0 book. Of course, what I wrote there was before the econolypse happened, and the legal market has changed substantially since then (although I noted some of these changing forces on the horizon). Fortunately, there are two law professors covering that angle in depth. Professor Brian Tamanaha (Washington University) has a new book out called "Failing Law Schools." He focuses on the economics of legal education, and the employment data issue. And Professor Bill Henderson (Indiana) is posting regularly to his blog The Legal Whiteboard. His focus is on the changing economics of the legal profession, and has written persuasively that the legal market has changed significantly and permanently. He also has a recent post that argues the ABA's new employment data disclosure requirement will put data in the hands of prospective students that will shift priorities in legal education.
In sum, the UVA situation was unfortunate and poorly handled. It is good that President Sullivan was reinstated. But she cannot do what is necessary without her faculty embracing change. And they probably need to do that, even at Mr. Jefferson's University. The same is true of all of higher education, and of course, the legal academy (broadly speaking) is not immune either. If anything, if you believe Tamanaha and Henderson, these matters are more acute for us.
