UVA to fight pair of wrongful death suits

UVA has been named as a defendant in two separate wrongful death suits in three months, fallout from a tragic year at the University. But how much blame lies at school’s doorstep in the unrelated 2010 deaths of lacrosse star Yeardley Love and Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey? Love’s mother filed a $30 […]

Is Coursera the key to online learning at UVA?

Last week, UVA announced it was the latest university to partner with Coursera, an online learning company started last fall by a pair of Stanford professors. The deal is being presented as a win-win: since no money is exchanging hands, it’s a way for UVA to expand its brand for free, administrators said. But the […]

UVA grapples with GE in electronic records suit

More than three years after it filed a $30 million lawsuit against the software company hired to design an electronic records system for its hospital, UVA heads to Charlottesville Circuit Court this week, and while the suit is expected to suck up an unusually large amount of the court’s time, it’s just the latest chapter […]

Sullivan reinstated: a timeline of events

Over the course of 16 days, anger, confusion, and ultimately resolution washed over UVA’s Grounds in the turmoil following President Teresa Sullivan’s removal. Here’s the breakdown of the saga—one resignation and one reaction at a time at a time—from the moment the surprise announcement came to the day she was reinstated. The bomb drops Instead […]

Higher ed scholar says Sullivan reinstatement ‘unprecedented’

Leaf to the back of University of Georgia sociology professor Joseph Hermanowicz’s 2011 book The American Academic Profession: Transformation in Contemporary Higher Education, and you’ll find a familiar name. A few weeks ago, Teresa Sullivan’s contribution to the book, an essay on the institutional importance of university faculty that was written while she was still […]

Quoting Thomas Jefferson at UVA

The ever-quotable Thomas Jefferson had plenty to say during his lifetime about governance, transparency, and the future of the university he founded. No surprise, then, that his name and words have been invoked a number of times over the last three weeks by people on both sides of the debate on Grounds over Sullivan’s resignation. […]

McDonnell returns Dragas to expanded UVA Board

Two weeks after UVA students and faculty followed Rector Helen Dragas to her car after a marathon closed-door Board of Visitors meeting yelling “Resign!,” Governor Bob McDonnell announced that the much-criticized Board leader would keep her seat. And despite the anger directed at her for her role in orchestrating the ultimately unsuccessful ouster of President […]

Don’t I know you? Getting reacquainted with Teresa Sullivan

UVA President Teresa Sullivan grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas until the age of 13, when her family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where she went on to become valedictorian at St. Joseph’s High School, the first high school in the state to integrate, in 1967. “We were all touched by those times. They were what […]

Sullivan reinstated in unanimous Board vote

In a unanimous vote Tuesday afternoon, UVA’s Board of Visitors reinstated Teresa Sullivan as president of the University. The vote came more than two weeks after the surprise announcement of Sullivan’s resignation June 10, and just over a week after a divided Board voted to appoint an interim president, who then stepped aside as anger […]

Zeithaml addresses Sullivan’s ouster

 “I think everybody recognizes that the process was deeply flawed, and I don’t condone it,” newly appointed interim President Carl Zeithaml said of his predecessor’s ouster at yesterday’s press conference on Grounds.