Monthly Archive for January, 2010

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Terry Sullivan Named as UVA President

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 11, 2010 in UVa. 22 Comments

The UVA Board of Visitors has named Teresa A. Sullivan the new president of the university. The sixty-year-old woman is currently the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she’s been since 2006. From 1975-2006, she taught sociology in various capacities at the University of Texas at Austin, with four years in there spent teaching the same thing at the University of Chicago. Her particular expertise is on labor demography, a topic on which she’s published many papers. She has no prior connection to the university, making her the first such president of the school since the very first president, Edwin A. Alderman, who took office in 1904. 10:45 PM Update: Also, Bob O’Neill also had no prior connection.

There were a great many candidates whose names were bandied around in the past couple of days, some reasonable (e.g., Gene Block, Ed Ayers), some just bizarre (e.g., Condoleeza Rice). But “Terry Sullivan” was not a name that anybody uttered—nobody saw this coming. One note about today’s announcement: It came during the winter break, a time when students and teaching faculty are away from the university, on a day when even President Casteen is out of town. It’s an odd bit of timing, which may be coincidental, or it may have been deliberate.

President John Casteen will end his twenty-year run as president on July 31; Sullivan starts the next day.

Disclaimer: I work in the president’s office, but obviously I’m not writing here in that capacity.

Biscuit Run Questions

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 10, 2010 in Business. 6 Comments

Edgar, a local investor, e-mailed me three questions that local media outlets ought to be asking about Biscuit Run:

  1. Did the original Biscuit Run owners get paid in full?
  2. Did Hunter ever really sign a deal with Ryan Homes, or was that just talk to sell shares?
  3. Does the bank involved—at least the one bank that has been identified—have a lien on the property for the loan, and if so, how can someone “donate” land to the state if a lien is on it, unless the state or Hunter or someone has made some collateral guarantee to the bank?

I’m not smart enough to know how to get answers to these questions, but here’s hoping that somebody does. There might be a story here.

The Future of Charlottesville Print Media

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 5, 2010 in Business, Meta News and Site News. 10 Comments

I’m trying something new here—taking a cvillenews.com discussion into a real, physical forum. In an event held jointly with Left of Center in one week’s time at Rapture. Here’s the promotional blurb:

News media across the country are collapsing. After recent staff cuts, furloughs and the shutdown of local printing for The Daily Progress, will Media General be doing more downsizing? Can we support four TV stations? Two weeklies? Will blogs replace all of them? What about the partnership between the non-profit Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Daily Progress, being watched nationally as a possible future model for local news?

University of Virginia media studies professor Bruce Williams will give a historical overview of how changing “media regimes” in the U.S. have impacted political communication and civil society, and how the recent “broadcast era” may have been an anomaly in the larger sweep of American history. Then we’ll talk about what the future holds with Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Sean Tubbs, Daily Progress assistant city editor Josh Barney, and Hook editor Hawes Spencer.

Free appetizers and socializing (with a cash bar) from 7 to 7:30 p.m precedes a panel discussion and introduction to the issue. Then we open the floor to audience questions. Come join the discussion.

RSVP on Facebook so we’ll know you’re coming (or, if you’re not down with Facebook, you can RSVP here or, hey, just show up). Though it was tempting to include broadcast media, we’ve deliberately focused primarily on print media, in order to prevent the discussion from being too broad and shallow—sorry, broadcast folks. Next time.

Tuesday, January 12, 7:00 PM, Rapture. I hope you’ll come.

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