The Long Roll

Second, students are not merely consumers of higher education; they also actively construct their college careers. They develop a plan for their coursework, their project work, their extracurricular activities, and their social network.

We were, by many measures, neglected, although we preferred to think of it as European (sounds better).

When it comes to their own career paths, provosts appear skeptical of the desirability of their bosses’ jobs. Relatively few provosts want them.

It can easily be used in a car in a parking lot while you’re waiting for your kids.

Our power is always going to be in the faculty,” she says. “They’re the people with the ideas. I feel sometimes in higher education we’re forgetting that.

Dragas has virtually no support for the decision on U.Va.’s Grounds — opposition has come from all the deans, the faculty senate, the provost and even her handpicked designee as interim president, McIntire School of Commerce Dean Carl P. Zeithaml, who has backed away from the position.

But she does have a key supporter in Paul Tudor Jones, a Connecticut billionaire and U.Va. alumnus and donor — the university’s John Paul Jones Arena is named for his father. Jones wrote an opinion column for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville last Sunday, outlining some of the same concerns that Dragas raised about challenges facing the university.

Universities are communities composed of numerous stakeholders, all of whose voices should be reflected in decision making. Leadership calls for relentless consultation, the balancing of goals, of conflicting ambitions and agendas along with contrasting, often antithetical, priorities. Choices are inevitable. Presidents, faculty, and boards must find common ground, especially in difficult financial circumstances. A unilateral act by one part of the triumvirate (as is the situation at UVa) diminishes not only the power structure but also the soundness of the institution.

The governor advocates a greater focus on vocational training, frequently using the example of welding as a high-demand skill. Representatives of public and private higher education and business make up the commission.