The board just voted unanimously to reinstate her.

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This is not a surprising outcome. Students and faculty deserve, on this beautiful summer day, to celebrate, and I’m sure they will. They responded strongly and immediately to what really does seem to have been an attempted coup.

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I actually think this story was au fond about human rather than university values.

Remember the famous letter that guy who quit Goldman Sachs wrote? (“[I]f you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”) That thing was everywhere — New York Times and everywhere. Remember? Everyone was talking about it. Why?

Because nobody really wants to become a vampire squid. Some people want to become rich and powerful, but few – beyond a scattering of psychopaths – like the idea of reviewing their lives at the end of days and realizing that all that time they were Lloyd Blankfein. We live in a capitalist economy and a competitive culture, and we all deal with that in various ways; but it’s terribly important to us that there be locations in our country where exclusively market-driven values do not dominate.

Teresa Sullivan is a typical, traditional university president in that she is always trying to balance bottom line exigencies with the university’s higher calling, its status as one of the rare places in the United States where serious people gather to do something other than engage in commercial trade. She lives in the world of humane studies. Humane. Humanistic. Having to do with human beings, and bringing to human beings moral as well as intellectual seriousness. Evolving a sense of the diversity, complexity and vulnerability of human beings — think of all those literature courses — and ultimately perhaps evolving a way of dealing with other human beings that reflects an understanding of diversity, complexity, and vulnerability.

The moguls on the board of visitors at U Va were – to put it very simply – cruel. They gave no thought to the vulnerability of Teresa Sullivan; they simply summoned her and bullied her out of a job. They humiliated her. It is not enough to succeed; others must fail, says La Rochefoucauld. That is the world outside — and, sadly, to some extent, inside — the university. When it reveals itself with such clarity as it just did at one of our greatest public universities, our anxieties over what we’re turning into at the highest financial levels of our culture — amoral acquisitive people who positively enjoy hurting others — we respond with great vehemence, as the Goldman Sachs guy who couldn’t take it anymore did.

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding.

We all know it’s eroding; and we all know that it continues to be the case that the people who are the most eroded get the biggest rewards. Most of us want in some instinctive way to protect our universities from that process of erosion. When messengers from that world emerge into sunlight, we pounce. It’s the only thing to do.

… the NPR program Fresh Air interviews Kevin Carey on American universities.

… but don’t forget the even more scandalous Southern Illinois University group, presided over by pitiable president-for-life Glenn Poshard. (Put his name in my search engine for years of background.) U Va’s misery will probably end today; SIU’s trustees are the gift that keeps on giving.

You can sense this student journalist trying to grapple with the Beckettian absurdity of her school’s inept president and non-functional trustees as everyone fights with everyone – in public. “It’s just plain bullshit, and he knows it. He is only trying to deflect the truth of what’s going on at that university.” That’s the recent chair of the board talking about the president of the university.

Read the whole article if you want to get the particular piquancy that is the SIU leadership at work: A combination of emotional immaturity, political hackery, and organizational cluelessness.

Google Map UD‘s house and you don’t see a house. All you see are trees. Zoom in as much as you like. No house. Trees. Somewhere under that canopy is a little brown house, but the trees swallowed it up.

There are a couple of reasons why UD‘s house is over-forested, why it’s more like a country than a city house, even though it’s in the city.

Yes, UD‘s part of Maryland is urban, and getting more so by the minute. Development around the green island of Garrett Park – the town where UD lives – is rampant.

Which makes it all the more surreal to UD that her life in the little brown house is powerfully dominated by the natural world. Have all the animal and plant species displaced by development moved to Rokeby Avenue?

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Garrett Park itself has long been an arboretum, with immense trees everywhere. And the town’s always planting more.

UD‘s neighbors and old friends the Pratts own a strip of woods next to UD‘s house. From these woods each August UD harvests giant puffball mushrooms. The same woods hold the graciously rotting branches of immense trees that have, over many years, fallen during wind storms.

Farther up the slope of UD‘s half-acre, the Pratt woods hold large families of deer. One of the families just produced two fawns whose spotted bounciness UD grudgingly admits (she hates deer) is adorable.

Continuing along to the edge of these woods at the top of UD‘s property, we come to another reason her house has disappeared under trees: the railroad. CSX owns the land immediately adjacent to its tracks, which means yet more forest.

One summer we came back from a stay at our little house near Cooperstown and found a dead deer at the foot of our back deck. The smell was outrageous. The guy who took it away said it was probably hit by a train and then staggered down to our house.

Hang a left back toward UD‘s property and we find, under centuries of wild grape, a fox den. The fox feast on the rabbits all over UD‘s lawns. From a tree back there, at night, horned owls swoop down on baby squirrels.

This year, for the first time, I’m seeing gophers.

The most exotic thing I’ve ever seen on my land is a mink.

You say mink need water sources? Another reason UD lives with so much wildlife is that her house lies near Rock Creek.

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UD is under surveillance by a number of these animals, in particular the fox and deer. They are always watching from the edges of the woods.

UD used to see a lot of racoons and opossums, but she doesn’t anymore. I’m sure they’re out there.

Box turtles sunbathe in the vinca.

Elphaba, a toad, took up residence on UD‘s front stoop one season, and that was wonderful. Magical. You’d flip on the light at night and she’d be gulping down bugs.

Last May I stepped on a big garter snake. Now when I enter thickets to cut trailing whatevers, I scan the ground.

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Even as I blog, Adam from The Beekeepers is shoveling up a huge yellow jacket nest next to my house. I’ve been aware of it for years, but everyone left everyone alone until yesterday, when I moved the lawnmower over the mound. Out they came, stinging my ankles pretty badly.

I unplugged the mower, shook off the yellow jackets (luckily I was wearing gloves), ran into the house, bathed my ankles in soap and hot water, placed ice cubes wrapped in cloth around my ankles, took a Benadryl and a Tylenol, and tried to calm down.

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Wow. I didn’t even get to the birds. Last week I found two dead, not-out-of-the-nest babies – one at the end of my driveway, the other on the front lawn.

What we’ve mainly got are robins, cardinals, mourning doves, cat birds, grackles, wrens, and blue jays. I don’t see them often, but I hear wood thrushes every night and every morning – a gorgeous sound.

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Adam and I chat at my front door. The afternoon is sunny, with mild wind and low humidity.

He couldn’t find the nest. He put down a white powder which will kill most of the wasps, and he’s coming back on Friday to see how things are. Maybe he’ll find the nest by then. Even if he doesn’t, he guarantees that they won’t come back.

But for the next few days “you have quite a few angry wasps out there, flying around wondering where their home went. They’re going to be looking for someone to blame. I’d stay away from that area, or use caution.”

Today is George Orwell’s birthday.

How could the guy who discovered gems like this now be accused of research fraud????

Yeah definitely not a good sign when your program director denies being your program director.

And the school president, despite having received letters from students complaining about endemic cheating, says “I don’t know anything about it.”

Definitely not good.

UD‘s already written about the often bogus but – for many schools – financially irresistible executive MBA program. The one at Baruch College begins to look positively criminal.

For damn sure not good.

Hey. But here’s something good. The dean who oversaw all of this and then skipped out just got a job at the University of Connecticut! “Baruch Business Dean John Elliott is set to take over as dean of UConn’s business school in August.” Lucky U Conn! What with its basketball team banned from postseason play because of pathetic classroom performance, and now this guy in its business school, U Conn is covering itself with academic laurels.

[Was Penn State’s leadership] really trying to protect the program by protecting a child molester? If so, there’s only one way [for the NCAA] to punish a program like that beyond the civil lawsuits the university itself is facing.

Pennsylvania State University, as an institution, decided that protecting Joe Paterno’s reputation and winning a few more football games was more important than stopping the ongoing rape of young boys.

… For at least a decade, and probably far longer, State College was full of people who deliberately closed their eyes to the truth about Sandusky.

… [T]he powers that were — including Paterno, Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz, who we now know kept a thick file on Sandusky — decided that, as president Spanier put it in a deleted email that he sued to get back, the “humane” thing would be to cover up Sandusky’s ongoing career of serial child rape.

[T]he Penn State football program was sort of its own little fiefdom and people were aware to varying degrees of what was going on and … that never resulted in greater action until, you know, victims started coming forward.

… [F]or a long time now, there’s been a move, as football programs have gotten bigger, to sort of separate them from the university and when you bring in recruits to the university, you know, you say, this is where the students live, but this is where the football players live and this is where the football players eat and that sort of thing. And, you know, former players I’ve talked to at Penn State said you really could almost go through your whole career there hardly interacting with anybody who wasn’t part of the football program or part of your team.

That’s been a trend at a lot of universities, although I think Penn State to a greater extent. And, now, you’ve seen a lot of big programs sort of reeling that back and trying to reintegrate their football programs into the university as a whole.

Where is this happening? I can’t think of any campus where the trend is anything other than the exact opposite, with Kentucky’s John Calipari leading the way – he increasingly doesn’t even bother playing games on UK’s campus. Professional venues are much better than some dinky school arena.

No, the trend toward separation – or colonization of the university by the big sports teams – is obvious. There’s simply too much money involved in college football and basketball for things to go any other way.

… sport, not to be entered into lightly, since they’ll certainly all sue.

As Virginia’s governor threatens to fire U Va’s entire board unless they resolve their now-notorious governance issues, UD reminds you of the tale of Diamandopoulos And The Eighteen Dwarves.

Many years ago little Adelphi University hired Peter Diamandopoulos as its president. He instantly set about putting business cronies on the board with whom the university, with flagrant conflict of interest, did all kinds of business. The board showed its gratitude by granting him insane salary increases and perks (a fancy Manhattan condo, etc.) and anything else he wanted. At one point he had the second-highest compensation of any American university president. Meanwhile enrollment fell by forty percent, the school’s ranking tanked, and faculty were really, really pissed – especially when certain details of the man’s, er, lifestyle were made public.

Entertaining his old friend on the board, John Silber, over dinner and drinks ended up costing Adelphi $546. Dr. Silber was president and is now chancellor of Boston University.

The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer is The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

… Among Dr. Diamandopoulos’s expenses highlighted by Amy Gladstein, a lawyer for the Coalition to Save Adelphi, was a $579 pen he ordered for Ernesta Procope to celebrate her election as board chairwoman.

There was also the $82,314 Mercedes that Adelphi provided to Dr. Diamandopoulos.

Those were the good old days! Silber also showed his gratitude: When Adelphi finally dumped Diamandopoulos, Silber gave him a philosophy professorship at Boston University.

Okay, so the Virginia story isn’t about excessive compensation and conflict of interest; but behind all of Diamandopoulos’s money-mongering was his impatience to revolutionize Adelphi and make it a model of go-go corporate activity — exactly the motive of Helen Dragas and various hedgies on the board at U Va, for whom Teresa Sullivan was too academic, too incrementalist…

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Anyway. If the governor dumps the board (it’s unlikely to happen – the board is likely to reappoint Sullivan), expect the board to sue to regain their seats. Adelphi’s, with much huffing and puffing, did: “We will go to the ends of the earth to rectify this gross injustice,” wrote Ernesta with her Amazing Pen.

That suit went nowhere, but the one demanding money back from Diamandopoulos and the dwarves did quite well, netting millions from them. Heigh ho.

Aggressive, acquisitive, not terribly moral, hyper-rich people will always want to be associated with universities, and will often pay immense sums for the association. Universities – meditative, morally serious, non-materialistic – stand for everything these people are not.

Some super-wealthy want a trusteeship for cover. For Bernard Madoff to sit on a Yeshiva University board – as he did – was obviously a great coup for him, a great whitewashing.

But most of the venture capitalists panting to be trustees have more complex motives. Certainly some see it as an opportunity to make yet more money by getting the university to invest in their companies. More broadly, some know that they’ll make a useful set of social and business connections in this way.

And of course it’s good for the ego. Being a university trustee has a high hoity-toity factor; it impresses people.

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The contemporary American university is well within its rights to trade on its symbolic capital in exchange for real capital. If Steven A. Cohen desperately wants, along with his eight billion dollars, to be a Brown University trustee, let him for God’s sake. Are you an idiot?

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And what are the deeper motives here? What precisely is that symbolic capital which can be worth so much in sheer dollars to the university?

A lot of people yearn to be perceived not merely as smart, but as cultured. The contemporary art market would collapse if it had to rely on people actually understanding and liking particular pieces or traditions of art.

Art and culture acquisitions are quick ways of making oneself aesthetically and intellectually superior, and this is important to many people, since it seems to be the case that the more material goods you acquire, the more anxious you become not to be perceived as motivated by material gain.

It’s an odd paradox – the more sixty million dollar yearly bonuses Lloyd Blankfein gets, the more antsy Lloyd Blankfein becomes not to be perceived as greedy.

Offsetting that remarkable level of personal greed is not easy, however, and something like a university trusteeship says two important things at once: I’m not spending all of my time as a vampire squid. And I have a soul; it’s not all about money for me.

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There are exceptions to this craving for university capital. Donald Trump is a true blue American vulgarian. But as a general rule, the finer the university, the higher the price it can place on its capacity to shed non-materialism upon the materialistic.

Hence the University of Chicago acted rationally when it made Rajat Gupta a trustee. I guess appointing Steve Stevanovich was also rational. But after awhile, as Yeshiva University learned, a critical mass problem may develop. After awhile, you take on one too many suspected insider traders or whatever, and your university’s reputation begins to suffer.

Your reputation is the source of your symbolic capital. Fuck it up, and Steve Cohen isn’t buying.

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In the case of the University of Virginia, the problem seems not so much lawsuits and questionable business practices as the decision to put trustees with no discernible sense of the nature of universities in positions of great power. Fiascos of the sort U Va is dealing with will eventually happen when you give your entire board of trustees over to the corporate world.

Thus did a handful of wealthy and well-connected individuals who have no recognized credentials or expertise in the field of higher education, including two members of the Board of Visitors (namely, the rector, a real-estate developer appointed by Gov. Tim Kaine, and the ex-vice rector, a venture capitalist appointed by Gov. Bob McDonnell), privately persuade themselves that a revolution was on the horizon and that this revolution — the arrival, trajectory and outcome of which are, to say the least, uncertain — necessitated destabilization of one of the world’s great public research universities and the public and private humiliation of UVa’s first woman president, the internationally esteemed scholar and public higher education leader, Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan.

Jeffrey Rossman, The Daily Progress

It’s part of Udemy’s Faculty Project, and can be found here. (Remember: You need to register.)

A nice take on the Charlottesville shabbiness in Slate.

In the [outraged] aftermath [of the firing], the board, led by Dragas — which I swear is the name of a teacher of the Dark Arts in Harry Potter 8 — was obscure, shifty, and defiant in the face of questions about what had led to the surprise firing. Dragas published a statement that was as serpentine as Mr. Jefferson’s famous walls. It alternated between jargon, ass-covering, self-congratulation, and faux sympathy. She answered none of the pertinent questions related to Sullivan’s ouster while declaring that any turmoil over how she had been fired stemmed from the board’s excessive attachment to the “truth.” A later statement from Dragas outlined some of the challenges the university faces but never addressed the central point: where Sullivan fell short.