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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's pretty close to just buying a seat. They're mostly made up some mixture of: 1) large donors to the university, who're appointed to maintain good relations, encourage future donations, etc.; and 2) for public universities, large political donors, who're appointed by governors, sort of in the way that ambassadorships often go to big political donors.

It'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'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 "elder statesman" type figure, e.g. a former governor or Congressman.

It'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 "former CEO of Paramount Pictures" and "husband of Dianne Feinstein".

I'll add that by all accounts she was beloved and was doing what was widely considered a great job. NOBODY was openly complaining, it was very sudden.

Also alum, and I concur with your view. This is a high caliber guy who is resigning; he is (from his letter) married to a high caliber woman also on the faculty.

This is huge. This will cause a loss of confidence in UVA if they don't take effective action to recover.

As a current student (undergraduate; CS/Math), and the son of two faculty members (Music/English) I'll agree with this. Every faculty member involved in some sort of administration that I know (both parents, multiple family friends, and people I have had courses for and work for) were in favor of Sullivan's proposed changes: anyone who has spent time around a University can imagine how hard it is to get that level of buy-in from the professors. (Hint: imagine herding irritable, opinionated, and very, very smart cats that are often impossible to fire. Then imagine that some of them have large bullhorns and are willing to write for Slate if they disagree with you, like Siva Vaidhyanathan here: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m... Point being, it is hard to get consensus, and I might be understating that.)

The main objection that I and most people I've talked to have is that the BOV hasn't given a good reason for its actions. It may very well be that Sullivan deserved to be fired. It may very well be that there needed to be more drastic changes than she was willing to make (although for an appropriate idea of how hard drastic, top down change is at a top University, see my description of faculty consensus above). But without releasing any concrete reason, backed up by publicly available data, and by essentially saying "shut up and trust our judgment", they showed a fundamental disconnect between their idea of acceptable governance and the rest of the university's idea of acceptable governance. For the record, I think that if you look at them as the board of a corporation replacing a CEO, their actions are totally reasonable (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was, in part, how they viewed themselves; this doesn't really say much for their case, though, because that still shows a massive cultural disconnect between them and the university body).

   It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a
   bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change
   to the future plans of the University, not incremental
   change.

Which, as I recall, was revealed in some seriously mustache-twirling e-mails that the main orchestrator had used the Reply All feature for or something to that extent. I can't remember which article I read this in, but this has all the elements of the most interesting and scandalous affair in academia this year.

I'm not sure if it's the original source, but the reply-all mishap from the hedge-fund guy, re: "confidential project", is mentioned in this article: http://www.readthehook.com/104250/important-alums-did-they-t...

Perhaps this one?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...

That's the one! This drama deserves a well-written article that captures the scope of this scandal.

How does someone get to be a University professor with writing that terrible. The content is interesting but the writing is atrocious.

Sounds like an american version of the novel Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue