Early last month, I had the opportunity to be in a small group conversation with the president of one of the world’s great private universities. During the session, one of us asked the president what issue she was most concerned about and she immediately answered that it was the pressures on the pubic university system in the United States. She told us that her friends and colleagues leading those schools were facing enormous challenges such as the fiscal conditions of the states that support them and the rapidly changing nature of how learning is delivered.
Just a few weeks later, a lot of what she was talking about played out in dramatic fashion at the University of Virginia. In case you missed it, here’s the quick summary. Over the course of several months, Helen Dragas, the chair of the University’s Board of Visitors, privately solicited the support of other members of the Board to force the recently hired president of UVA, Teresa Sullivan, out of her job. Dragas and others on the Board had concluded that Sullivan was not moving quickly enough to position UVA for a different future. Sullivan was apparently blindsided when Dragas told her that the Board was prepared to vote her out and gave her the opportunity to resign. It’s clear that the broader UVA community was blindsided. Faculty, students, alumni and state legislators rallied around Sullivan and two weeks after the Board forced her resignation, they voted to reinstate Sullivan as president.
There are so many leadership lessons and issues in this case that it’s impossible to address them all in one blog post so I’ll just focus on how Dragas handled this situation from beginning to end.