The firestorm over the firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan continues. Yesterday, hours after thousands of students, faculty, and workers held a demonstration in support of Sullivan, the Board of Visitors named Carl P. Zeithaml, head of the McIntire School of Commerce at UVA, interim president. Calling for the resignation of the head of the Board of Visitors, the faculty senate has planned a vigil that will take place this afternoon. And the word "GREEED" was graffitied in red dye on the columns of the Rotunda, the central building on campus.

Most commentators have framed the conflict between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors as one of "broad philosophical differences," namely a tension between the "university" values of the former and the "business" values of the latter, made up of real estate speculators, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers. One of the earliest articles to publicize what was happening, written by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, praised Sullivan's leadership skills and vision for the university, while criticizing the language used by members of the Board to describe what they saw as her faults: concepts like "strategic dynamism" imported from the world of business. Vaidhyanathan writes, "The inappropriateness of applying concepts designed for firms . . . to a massive and contemplative institution as a university should be clear to anyone who does not run a hedge fund or make too much money." Similarly, David Silbey ridicules the emphasis on "strategic dynamism" and the "cultural obsession with the market" that exists here in the US, asserting that "If business and academia function exactly as they should, especially if they function exactly as they should, they are antithetical to each other." And David Karpf goes over the same argument once again in a piece published today. After noting the resignation of Vice Rector Mark Kington, one of the plotters involved in the backroom coup against Sullivan, he writes:

Much has been made of the strategic mumblespeak offered by Rector Helen Dragas. After two years on the job, President Sullivan had not demonstrated enough "strategic dynamism." She apparently was forging an incremental path for moving Mr. Jefferson's University into the future. The big donors on the Board of Visitors wanted her to run UVA more like a business.

It is certainly true that the importation of concepts from the business world, the corporatization of the university, the privatization of public education, and the financialization of everything have caused innumerable problems at public universities, none more significant than the $1 trillion of student debt that has placed students in a state of indentured servitude. But there's a serious problem with the way these arguments are being framed. Administrators have been running universities like businesses for decades. For this reason, the conflict between President Sullivan and the Board of Visitors is not a question of running the university "more" or "less" like a business. It is not a conflict between good, old-fashioned "university values" on one hand and nonsensical or inapplicable "business values" on the other. It is rather a conflict between competing business models.

President Sullivan herself has long been applying the language of business to the public universities where she's served as an administrator -- UT Austin, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia -- all sites of intense privatization during Sullivan's time there. Indeed, this is precisely why the Board of Visitors hired her in the first place. In his piece, Vaidhyanathan praises Sullivan's administrative prowess by noting that, once established at UVA, "she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitor’s top priority." Initially, at least, all actors were in agreement with regard to the need to rationalize the university's money flows.

Over the course of two pieces at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jack Stripling outlines Sullivan's proposal for a "more decentralized budget model" in a little more detail. "Often described as 'responsibility center management' or 'RCM,' the model allows individual academic units to retain the revenues they generate." In the other article, he continues:

Ms. Sullivan's signature effort over the last year was a reinvention of Virginia's budgeting model. . . . Versions of the model are employed by a number of elite institutions, including Harvard University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Ms. Sullivan was provost before she came to Virginia.

Ms. Sullivan's faculty supporters say her two-year tenure did not allow enough time to test the model, which is designed to promote creativity and entrepreneurship among departments that will benefit directly from money-making programs.

RCM was pioneered at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s and from there began to spread. By 1997, a survey found that approximately 16 percent of public universities and 31 percent of private universities had fully or partly implemented RCM. Since then, its reach has only continued to grow. Major universities that now use RCM include University of Toronto, University of Michigan, USC,  University of Indiana, University of New Hampshire, Kent State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Iowa. As of fiscal year 2012, University of Arizona and and the University of Washington both have plans to implement RCM.

In his book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, David Kirp tracks the rise of RCM, focusing especially on the experience at USC. He writes:

Proponents [of RCM] contend that a university should be run like a firm, in which every academic unit carries its weight financially. In business terms, that means each unit is expected to be a profit center. Whether it's the college of arts and sciences, the dental school, or the business school, the costs -- which include salaries, space, and the like -- cannot exceed the revenues, whether raised through tuition, contracts, grants, or gifts. A school that runs a surplus gets to keep it, while a school with a deficit has to pay it back.

(...)

Though this sounds arcane, the stakes are high. The debate over the wisdom of running a university according to the principles of the corporate profit center is in essence a contest of worldviews. It is an argument between those who believe that the citizens of a university are members of a company whose chief mission is to maximize dollar profits and those committed to the idea of the university as a community in which "gift relationships" are the norm. (pp. 115-16)

What's interesting about this formulation is how much it resonates with the standard story about Sullivan's ouster. What appears here as a "contest of worldviews," one essentially corporate and the other essentially academic, is resurrected in a very different context today. Its appearance is the same, but on scratching the surface it becomes clear that the goalposts have shifted, that the worldview that Kirp identified as so clearly corporate and inappropriate to the university context has simply become part of the norm, a principle so obvious that it no longer seems out of place or offends. In a way, this invisibility, the fact that so many critics have missed the fact that Sullivan's leadership, like that of the Board of Visitors, is informed by business practices, is one effect of privatization -- we no longer recognize it even when it's right in front of our eyes.

The structural logic of administration makes it impossible for university administrators today to opt out. No university president, however independent, can hold out for long against the pressures of the academic market. It doesn't make sense to criticize the corporate "mumblespeak" of the strategically dynamic Board of Visitors without at the same time understanding that President Sullivan not only used such language herself but made its implementation at UVA the "signature effort" of her presidency.

Sullivan's ouster was not the result of a clash of worldviews, academic and corporate. It wasn't about running UVA "more" like a business. It was a conflict, rather, between different business models that could not be effectively brought together. That's why bringing Sullivan back, as the faculty senate hopes to do, will not keep the market out of the university. It's not administrators but students and workers that are fighting privatization and austerity at every step of the way. Only by eliminating the administrative class can a new kind of university emerge.

The recent ouster of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, engineered by the real estate developers, hedge fund managers, and former Goldman Sachs partners who sit on the Board of Visitors (analogous to the notoriously corrupt UC Regents), has gotten a lot of attention and generated significant outcry over the past few days. The story is clear: as reported yesterday in the Washington Post, Sullivan was forced out because she was seen as resistant to austerity measures:

Leaders of the university’s governing board ousted Sullivan last week largely because of her unwillingness to consider dramatic program cuts in the face of dwindling resources and for her perceived reluctance to approach the school with the bottom-line mentality of a corporate chief executive. . . . Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

This detailed analysis of the situation, by Doctor Cleveland, outlines three specific areas that the Board of Visitors was pushing: 1) online education; 2) high-profile faculty recruitment; and 3) "Program Prioritization," in other words shifting funds from certain unfavored programs to other favored programs that the Board has deemed more valuable -- despite the fact that these programs are actually less profitable. "Program prioritization allows the central administration to take money from profitable units and redirect it to unprofitable units that the administration favors."

All of this, of course, resonates strongly with the policies that the UC administration and the UC Regents have sought to implement since the 1990s and at an accelerated pace over the last decade. Programs like "Operational Excellence" serve as a framework through which the administration can cut salaries and fire workers in the name of "streamlining" and "efficiency," while giving themselves raises and hiring ever more "deans, deanlets, and deanlings" who fill the bloated bureaucratic ranks to the point that senior managers now officially outnumber faculty at the UC. Academic programs have been cut and consolidated, class sizes have increased, out-of-state students are being accepted at higher rates, and everybody's tuition is skyrocketing.

But there's an important point from the experience of anti-privatization struggle at the UC that has so far been missing from the discussion. One of the earliest articles published on the topic, by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, accurately likened the Board of Visitors to "robber barons" who have "tr[ied] to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris." (These words would do equally well slapped across the foreheads of Dick Blum et al.) But Vaidhyanathan frames his argument as a defense of President Sullivan:

Sullivan is an esteemed sociologist who specialized in class dynamics and the role of debt in society. The author or co-author of six books, she spent most of her career rising through the ranks at the University of Texas, where she served as dean of the graduate school while I was working toward my Ph.D. in the late 1990s. She was known around Texas as a straightforward, competent, and gregarious leader. She carried that reputation from Texas to the University of Michigan, the premier public research university in the world, where she served as the chief academic officer, or provost, for four years.

When the University of Virginia sought a president to lift it from the ranks of an outstanding undergraduate school to a research powerhouse, while retaining its commitment to students and the enlightenment Jeffersonian traditions on which it was founded, the board selected Sullivan in 2010. She became the first woman to serve as president of UVA, a place she could not have attended as an undergraduate in the 1960s because it was all-male at the time.

Sullivan, in other words, is the administrator's administrator. Since the 1990s, she has occupied increasingly senior administrative positions at UT Austin and University of Michigan before being hired by UVA. Vaidhyanathan lists these positions as a way of praising Sullivan's qualifications, but the dark underside of his story is that these flagship universities are precisely the ones that have implemented some of the most wide-ranging privatization policies over the last two decades -- precisely when Sullivan was entering into the administrative ranks. It's no coincidence that Mark Yudof was dean from 1984-1994, then executive vice president and provost from 1994-1997 at UT Austin, before becoming chancellor of the University of Minnesota then president of the UC. And the University of Michigan has become a model for the privatization of public research universities across the country.

Sullivan's own policies may not have been too far out of line with the austerity agenda of our own UC administration. Vaidhyanathan writes, once again intending it as a compliment, that once established at UVA "she had her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was also the Board of Visitor’s top priority." She may have had different ideas about how to go about making these cuts, but at the end of the day her agenda also turned on its own set of cutbacks.

Furthermore, over the last two years, that is, in each year of her term, President Sullivan has overseen substantial tuition increases: 9.9 percent for in-state students (6 percent for out-of-state) in 2011, and another 8 percent for in-state (6.9 percent for out-of-state) in 2012. In a familiar twist, part of the money raised from the tuition hikes went directly to fund the operation of new buildings. In total, that made eight consecutive years of tuition increases of "somewhere below 10 percent."

No doubt real tensions existed between Sullivan and the Board of Visitors. And it seems clear that, beyond "philosophical differences," these tensions had to do with divergent views regarding what was seen as the appropriate pace of and sites for cuts. But for those of us on the ground at the UC, the public response -- calls to "reopen discussion" about Sullivan's resignation, even votes of no confidence in the Board of Visitors' decision -- seems somewhat misdirected. The removal of the president was sketchy as hell and the Board of Visitors is clearly corrupt, but the answer to the university in crisis is not more or even "better" administrators. "Better" administrators just mean that the implementation of privatization is smoother, if slower. But at the UC we have learned that it is a mistake to think of administrators as individuals: "This struggle against the administration is not about attacking individuals -- or not primarily. It is about the administrative logic of privatization, and the manner in which that logic is enforced." Sometimes this logic is enforced by riot cops, other times by billionaires on the Boards of Visitors. Sullivan's ouster must be read as a necessary result of this administrative logic, the same pressures that push administrators across the country to adopt, implement, and enforce similar policies. Once begun, privatization demands continual blood. But if Sullivan were to return to office, she would face the same economic pressures and would be forced, sooner or later, to accede to them.

The argument is structural; that the administrator plays, and must play, a particular role in the management of the late capitalist university. It's not by chance that across the US all universities (certainly all public universities) are moving in the same directions: massive tuition hikes and corporate fund-raising campaigns, new construction projects to bring in grants and rich students, worker layoffs while adding to the bloated ranks of the administration. If the capitalist is capital personified, the late capitalist administrator is the personification of austerity.

The only way to stop the privatization of the public university is to take it back from the administrative class whose existence depends on its continuation.

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