Kilgore Demands 30% Tuition Cut; UVA President Takes Aim at DeSteph

The UVA slush fund scandal continues, with serious markers being laid down by the Virginia General Assembly on their expectations for the Board of Visitors meeting today.

Unfortunately, the reaction from UVA leadership has been anything but recalcitrant.  In fact, it’s been positively in-your-face from President Sullivan, who took State Senator Bill DeSteph to task in what can only be described as something between a scene from “Mean Girls” and an 8th-grade snub, per a September 2nd letter to the state senator:

091516_sullivan-quip-to-desteph

We were discussing culture problems at the University of Virginia… were we not?

Of course, on September 8th, Delegate Terry Kilgore was adamant about what he wanted to see from the UVA Board of Visitors — a degree of penance and a willingness to set things right:

On September 15, your University’s Board of Visitors can right a wrong and recapture our confidence by rolling back tuition at least 30 percent, and by freezing that price and expanding in-state enrollment by at least 100 positions annually for the next five years.

Not a modest request from an instutution that aggregated a $2.3 billion warchest over the last 10 years.  Seems odd that Sullivan almost a week before felt confident enough to sent that sort of response to DeSteph while the sentiment within both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly was so visceral — does it not?

Perhaps the answer has something to do with the letter from the Joint Subcommittee letter stating the obvious that no law had been broken in aggregating the UVA Slush Fund:

We further advised President Sullivan that in keeping with the provision of § 2.2-1513 of the Code, any and all legislative requests for information on this matter would come either through the Joint Subcommittees or the respective Committee Chairs. We believe that this is an important issue that warrants our time and attention, and it is important that any requests for information be focused and pertinent to the use of the Fund to advance the University’s mission.

A convenient ace in the hole — right?

Now obviously, it would be irresponsible to suggest that correlation implies causality.  Surely, the bureaucracy huddled around the Rotunda has every right to react with the rashness and flippancy of Sullivan’s letter dated September 2nd and let the consequences be damned.

…but it still strikes the average observer as damn near odd.

State Senator DeSteph has not taken the news gently, nor have many other members of the Virginia General Assembly who have been forwarding bits and pieces of the environment, pieces that Bearing Drift readers will come to discover in the coming weeks.  DeSteph fired off a two letters thus far, one directly to Majority Leader Norment on September 14th:

(T)he issue has never been the legality of the fund.  Instead, the issues have always been that the University’s administration disguised the money, had private conversations with just a handful of the Board of Visitors’ leadership about how to spend public money and the investment income off of this public money, and convinced the Board to go along with its plans in an illegal closed session while simultaneously instructing members to keep them a secret from us and the public.

. . .

And if the law has not been broken, certainly its spirit has been crushed.

Ouch.

DeSteph goes further to describe Rector Goodwin as “less than candid,” Sullivan as giving him the “run-around” and telling other staff that what occurs at UVA is “none of his [DeSteph’s] business.”

…all qualities one expects of a product of the University, no?

DeSteph’s September 14th letter to Sullivan implies a warning, one that echoes the very same concern that State Senator Chap Petersen outlined in his September 3rd letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  UVA will either come clean or see deepened scrutiny — not a threat, but a promise earnestly made.

Thus the dichotomy between UVA’s defensive posture in late August contrasted with their seeming overconfidence on September 2nd — to the point where Sullivan felt entirely comfortable thumbing her nose at a state senator and telling him to pound sand in anticipation of the Joint Subcommittee’s letter precisely one week later?

It doesn’t add up.

Even if there was a self-high five going on behind closed doors, UVA would be sadly mistaken to think that the Virginia General Assembly has set this down.

There’s enough rope, and while Sullivan seems intent to hang herself with it with an ungracious spirit (before the Joint Subcommittee letter could even be published, one might add) it would be improper in the highest degree if the UVA Board of Visitors sought to create a hammock with either the UVA Slush Fund or the Virginia General Assembly’s latitude.

Such latitude shouldn’t be met with Sullivan’s snub — once again evidencing the cultural problem within certain corners of the bureaucracy at UVA.  Should the BOV not act responsively to the Virginia General Assembly’s expectations, one can only imagine what sort of reaction leaders such as Kilgore, Petersen, DeSteph and others will feel forced to perform.

Feel free to read the letters for yourself, and in the order of which they were provided.

DEVELOPING…


DISCLAIMER: The author is a 4th-year BIS student at the University.

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