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Yesterday’s two big events in the UVA debacle were Governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration that whatever Tuesday’s decision is, is final and Helen Dragas’ response to that letter. There were a couple of things of note in those two statements.

McDonnell’s letter to the Board of Visitors is all about acting as if he’s above the fray—he recommends no specific course of action regarding President Teresa Sullivan—but in reality he’s loading the dice. He calls on the members of the BOV to ignore what other people (faculty, staff, students, alumni, etc.) have to say, and just do what they want to do. Which sounds unbiased, but since these groups are unanimous in their support of Sullivan, it’s rather the opposite. He also says that whatever happens Tuesday is final—that the BOV is not allowed to change their minds any more. (Note that they have not yet changed their mind at all. Sullivan was forced out, and nothing has changed since.) What makes three a magic number, he does not say. This either indicates a pretty surprising disinterest in the outcome of a serious controversy at Virginia’s flagship university or that he has cause to think that the outcome is going to be his preferred one. McDonnell’s threat is that he’ll remove the entire Board of Visitors on Wednesday if they don’t get this settled. It doesn’t seem to make any sense for the BOV to ignore new information, as McDonnell’s demand explicitly requires. Even if the BOV found out on Wednesday that Sullivan is famed hijacker D.B. Cooper, McDonnell’s instructions would oblige them to ignore this knowledge and retain her as president. Both McDonnell and Dragas write in their statements that three BOV meetings are enough on this topic. Since Tuesday’s meeting will only be the second meeting of the BOV, that’s an odd assertion—it leaves room for yet another meeting, although it’d need to be squeezed in before Wednesday.

In her brief statement, Dragas unsurprisingly echoes McDonnell’s call to ignore the unanimous demand that Sullivan be reinstated (“we alone are appointed to make these decisions on behalf of the University, free of influence from outside political, personal or media pressure”).

Finally, a reliable source in the governor’s office yesterday told me that McDonnell intends to reappoint Dragas to the BOV on July 1, when her term expires. This sounds too dumb to be true, but after chewing it over, I think that there’s something to it. To be clear, the fact that I was told this doesn’t mean that it’ll happen. Not only could facts change that would cause McDonnell to not reappoint her, but the point may actually be to cause people (specifically the BOV and Sullivan) to believe that McDonnell would be willing to reappoint Dragas—that is, that the source was deliberately fed bad information. The Hook asked the governor’s spokesmen for a comment on this last night, and one responded saying that “the governor will make his decisions about board appointments in late June or early July”.

In a nutshell, the problem is that Sullivan has (ostensibly) said that she won’t return to the presidency unless Dragas steps down. So she’s left her fate in Dragas’ hands. If Dragas refuses to quit, Sullivan would refuse to retake the presidency. That would make Sullivan look petulant and Dragas look like the grown-up in the room. Sullivan loses and Dragas wins, and McDonnell is free to reappoint Dragas, with Dragas looking comparatively reasonable in the eyes of many. But if Sullivan drops the requirement of Dragas’ resignation (if it is, indeed, a requirement of hers), then Sullivan is victorious, Dragas feels like a fool, and McDonnell surely would not reappoint her. Sullivan can safely claim that she never demanded Dragas’ resignation—it was just a rumor. In either case, the governor has a week to test public response before deciding what to do.

In a hour-long, wide-ranging discussion, I chewed all of this over with dozens of people on Twitter last night. R. Cooper was kind enough to collect all of those tweets via Storify, which I’ve included after the jump for those who want to read the great discussion that we all had.

Continue reading ‘McDonnell Finally Weighs In; Will He Reappoint Dragas?’

The momentum of the Dragas vs. Sullivan power struggle shifted decidedly to President Teresa Sullivan’s advantage this afternoon, after a day of small victories for her was capped off by news that a Board of Visitors meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. First came word that ten of the eleven deans of the schools had signed a letter demanding the restoration of Sullivan to the presidency—the only non-signatory was McIntire Dean Carl Zeithaml, who wasn’t asked to sign, what with his position as kinda-sorta-interim president. (“Relationship status: it’s complicated.”) Then President Sullivan issued a statement calling for civility, the first communication from her since all of this went down, the real purpose of which seems to have been to remind people that she’s still president.

Finally, the big news of the day came out just a few minutes before 5 PM—at the last possible moment—that a special meeting of the Board of Visitors is scheduled for 3 PM on Tuesday, with a topic of “possible changes in the terms of employment of the President.” It was clear this morning that a board coup against Dragas was underway, with at least three members prepared to call for a meeting (the necessary number), but they wouldn’t want to have called that meeting unless they knew that they had a majority of the board in support of restoring Sullivan to the presidency. Implicitly, calling this meeting means that they’ve got the votes. This came at the end of a long day of vocal rabble-rousing by Sullivan supporters in the community, who have been organizing on the “United4Honor” Facebook group to get people to call and write the BOV and the governor, to embolden members of the BOV to come out as Sullivan supporters.

Another small bit of news today came in the form of a letter to the Cavalier Daily from BOV member Glynn Key. You’ll remember Key for having left the board’s marathon late-night session on Monday night/Tuesday morning. It hasn’t been clear why Key left, or whether she supported or opposed the coup against Sullivan. In the letter, she writes:

It would be personally convenient and gratifying if I described what happened in Executive Session, in order to explain to you why I departed at 1:30 am. But you know that it would be improper and dishonorable for me to breach the confidentiality requirements for Executive Session.

At a minimum, we now know that she left in protest of something occurring in that meeting. A think that a reasonable person reading this would conclude that she did not support the ouster of Sullivan, and her premature departure was tied to that.

There is still a rally scheduled for 2 PM on Sunday afternoon, which will now surely be infused with a level of enthusiasm—and probably attendance—not yet seen in this multi-week showdown.

The Cavalier Daily has FOIAd the UVA Board of Visitors’ internal communications—specifically, those sent and received by Rector Helen Dragas and now-former Vice Rector Mark Kington—and it’s good, good stuff. I think everybody could use some help translating them, especially from folks with deep knowledge of UVA, so if you spot anything interesting in them, please post a comment explaining! The short version is that this is all about online education, with Dragas and Kington convinced that if UVA doesn’t change its model immediately to teaching people via the internet, it’ll be a buggy-whip factory in no time.

Over at the Washington Post, Daniel de Vise and Anita Kumar have already provided their own timeline-based interpretation, and at the Progress Bryan McKenzie has summarized what he sees as the interesting bits. Also, the Cavalier Daily—having gotten these e-mails as printouts, which strikes me as a bit malicious—tweeted out the best ones last night as they scanned in the pages.