Members of the UVA Board of Visitors were, indeed, as dumb as we suspected

A nice piece of reporting by IHE:

E-mail messages were flying among leaders of the Board of Visitors of the  University of Virginia in the weeks leading up to the ouster of Teresa A.  Sullivan as president of the university. The e-mail messages show that one  reason board leaders wanted to move quickly was the belief that UVa needed to  get involved in a serious way with online education.

The board leaders traded articles in which various pundits suggested that  online education is the only real future for higher education -- and the e-mail  messages suggest that board members believe this view. On May 31, for example,  Helen Dragas, the rector (UVa-speak for board chair) sent the vice rector, Mark  Kington, the URL for a Wall Street Journal column  about online education. Dragas's subject line was "good piece in WSJ today -- why we can't afford to wait." The column, a look at the MOOC (massively online  open course) movement in higher education, has the subhead: "The substitution of  technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase  access to an elite-caliber education."

The column argues that the MOOCs have the potential to change the cost  structure in higher education, as long as institutions are willing to replace  some in-person education with online education. "[I]n this way, college X might  have its students take calculus, computer science and many other lecture courses  online from MIT-Harvard (or other suppliers), and have them take other classes  with their own local professors for subjects that are better taught in small  seminars. College X can thus offer stellar lectures from the best professors in  the world — and do locally what it does best, person to person," the column  says....

[T]he e-mail records suggest  both Dragas and Kington are committed to a major push into online education.

Both took time to comment on a major donor's e-mail in which he suggested  that university leaders study the way Stanford and Harvard Universities, among  others, were having success online. The donor wondered in his e-mail if these  developments are "a signal that the on-line [sic] learning world has now reached  the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be  left behind." Dragas replied: "Your timing is impeccable -- the BOV is squarely  focused on UVa's developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly  accelerating pace of change."

Another article -- this one forwarded from Kington to Dragas -- was the "The  Campus Tsunami," by the New York Times columnist David Brooks,  predicting massive change from the MOOCs, and also predicting that the new model  will involve much more learning from professors who are not at the college or  university a student attends.

So there you have it:  these glorified shopkeepers were taking their cues on the future of higher education from David Brooks.  UVA is doomed if these bozos aren't gone, quickly.