Scathing Online Schoolmarm will let you decide.

No she won’t.

Look. If you’ve got something to say, and that something matters a lot to you, and you’re lucky enough to have what you say appear in all sorts of high-profile places, you should really go to the trouble of writing it competently.

You’re a smart person, so you know you have trouble writing well. You also know that the crappier your statement of your position on a subject, the more likely you are to be ignored. So you write your thing, and then you give it to a friend for editing. Right? You give it to someone who’s a good writer before you send it out to all those publications. Yes?

If you’re William Wulf, hotshot computer professor at the University of Virgina who resigned in protest during the Teresa Sullivan dust-up, I’m afraid no.  You don’t bother giving your writing to someone who can shorten it, clarify your points, take out the heavy breathing. All the things good writers know how to do and bad writers may never learn.

So here’s Wulf, reprinted in the Washington Post, explaining why he still won’t return to U Va, even though Sullivan has been reinstated. His basic point, which should have taken four paragraphs tops, is that the board remains a bunch of corporate know-nothings, and until people who understand and care about universities appear on the board, he won’t reappear at U Va. So far, of the six comments on the letter, two are about his terrible writing. Terrible writing distracts from what you want to say. It draws attention to your writing, rather than to your argument. And when your writing is this terrible, it also makes people wonder how generally cogent you are, and therefore how strong your arguments here (or anywhere else) are. See why competent writing — SOS doesn’t even say good! She just means writing that gets you there, that gets it said! — really does matter?

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Just in case you missed it, I am one of the folks that publicaly [glaring spelling error] resigned over the forced resignation of President Sullivan. I resigned because I deeply care about the University, I thought President Sullivan was doing a great job, and thus felt deeply that this action, and the way it was taken, was profoundly damaging to the University. [Commas where semi-colons should be, but this isn’t important, and SOS wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t part of a larger shitpile.]

I was frankly surprised by the magnitude of the positive faculty and media reaction to my resignation – I don’t think of myself as the “marching in the street, and placard waving” type. [Unnecessary, distracting quotation marks. Why are they there? Who is he quoting? Is marching in the street and placard waving a well-known phrase?] So, after the initial flurry of email, except for bland replies to some, I have kept pretty quiet about the whole fiasco. But now I feel I need to voice a perspective on the solution to the underlying problem.

I have been asked by President Sullivan, my Dean, and even my departmental faculty, to “un-resign” – I have said NO, and the rest of this note is to explain to all of you why, and perhaps what it means to you. It is not because I don’t love UVa, and would love to rejoin its faculty – quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I do love and respect it so much! [Vaguely messy, conversational feel to the whole thing. Which is fine. No one says you have to write with more formality than that, and this is after all a letter. But lack of parallel structure – would he or would he not love to rejoin its faculty? – as well as what’s going to be an avalanche of exclamation marks will confuse and distract the reader.]

Like most of you, I was delighted by the re-instatement of Terry Sullivan – but that, I my view, didn’t fix the underlying problem!  [typo, exclamation] As my original message noted, my wife [Relevance of wife to his expertise?] and I have extensive experience in both executive positions and board positions in industry, academia, and government – we’ve seen the executive-to-board relationship from both sides, and in multiple contexts – and my judgment is that the current BOV is incompetent to govern UVa! Let me repeat – it’s incompetent for the task of governing UVa!  [Bad writing is often hyper-emotional, insistent, vehement, compulsively redundant.  Note that he repeats in almost exactly the same words what he’s just said.  A pointless, diluting move that merely makes the reader wonder what he’s on about.]  I am more than willing to stipulate that the BOV members are smart, good and accomplished people –but to be competent on a board requires a significant understanding of the institution they are governing. That’s what is lacking!  [The editor he didn’t consult would have put a big fat red line through the last sentence.]

The present BOV appointed by the Governor is 14 lawyers or corporate executives with no experience with academic governance, one part-time medic at John-Hopkins [Don’t bother to learn how to spell the university; you wouldn’t want the reader to think you cared enough about the people and the situation to get that sort of thing straight.], and one CEO of a small university. Alas, they don’t even seem to know much about UVa! While fond of selectively quoting Jefferson out of context, they overlook the deeply philosophical fact that Mr. Jefferson’s design for UVa had *no* President or central administration – the faculty governed the University, and did so in an open collaborative way, not in secret meetings behind closed doors,with no faculty input. Total faculty control wouldn’t work for today’s larger university, BUT … the BOV’s instincts were that top-down, command and control management was “right” [More pointless quotation marks.] and so tried to impose it. Well, it’s not right for universities, especially for UVa – and in fact,the data says that it is not right for most corporations either! It certainly wasn’t right for the corporations that I ran! But my main point is that faculty involvement in university governance is central to all universities, and especially to UVa.

Moreover, the current BOV clearly didn’t even investigate the issue they expressed concern about – for example on-line presence of the University (seemingly a big deal in TS’s firing), but they apparently just reacted to the hype of recent announcements by some other universities without investigating UVa’s record on the subject. Well, our involvement in digital scholarship and learning goes back at least twenty years – I know because I was a principal in getting it started! Please note in the prior sentence I said scholarship AND education. Great universities are about both – not just mass teaching! And a future great UVa must be about both! The current BOV, or at least those involved in firing Terry Sullivan, pretty clearly doesn’t understand that.

Are these uninformed folks likely to make smart future decisions for UVa? Alas, I think not! Smart and accomplished as they may be individually in other contexts, they just don’t have the knowledge base to make good decisions for UVa.

Just imagine a board imposed upon General Motors that consisted of 14 smart/accomplished academics, but with no industrial experience, one Chevy customer, and the CEO of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Would that work? No, of course not! And the converse isn’t working here either!  [Pretty well-stated, pretty strong point.  But look how he takes the air out of his tires by his goofy garrulous sentences at the end.  Just stop at store.]

What we need is a significant fraction of the BOV to be folks that deeply understand academia, and UVa in particular – I have been astounded by how shallow and un-informed the comments [verb needed here] by rector Dragas, for example.

I have a substantial list of distinguished current or former academic administrators that I know first hand, that are really bright and I would be happy to recommend them to serve on the BOV, and I’d even to be the first contact with them – but I haven’t been asked. Alas, they almost certainly didn’t make major contribution to the Governor’s campaign, so the chance of their selection under the current system are probably nil. BUT, it’s the system needs to be changed!

I am a more-than-a-tad concerned that the reinstatement of President Sullivan has taken a bit of wind out of the sails of faculty/student pressure for reform. In my view the time is not to compromise, but to stand for the principles of the University, and particularly the principle of faculty deeply involved its governance!!  [Ah.  There we go.  Double exclamation marks.  Will he go for three?]

Corporate style boards (of which both my wife and I have deep experience) are NOT the model for the BOV – nor is “damn the torpedoes” top-down executive management – and the fact that the current BOV doesn’t understand that is damning and destructive, and says a lot about the selection criteria that chose them! We MUST fix the selection criteria!  [What are you visualizing, personality-wise, for the guy at this point?  I’m seeing a guy who can’t get one thought out without bursting his appendix.]

Permit me to cycle back to my opening – I am not a “march and wave placards” type – partly because I find it intellectually repugnant, but also in no small measure because I don’t think it’s especially effective in our context. You may disagree. What I do think we need is a moderate,well-reasoned argument for why the structure of the BOV needs to be changed for the benefit of the University – and the state. But please note that I think the argument needs to be delivered to the folks that can effect that change and that the present process is a political one,and while I am not in favor of marching and placard waving, I also think our actions need to include political ones – just what those actions are should be needs to be a collective decision of the faculty, so I’ll stay silent on that for now.

But we DO need to act to fix the problem underlying President Sullivan’s firing! Will she stay long term, or would we be able to recruit a comparable replacement given the current BOV and the criteria for future BOV selections? In my view — NO! Unless there is fundamental change, UVa is on a downward spiral. It hurts me to the core! UVa has been SO special! To see it self-destruct is as painful as I can imagine.