Pretty bracing stuff, but wholly accurate, as someone who held high administrative posts at much stronger public research universities would have recognized. Outside U.S. News college rankings, no one thinks UVA is on a par with Berkeley or UCLA, and President Sullivan obviously wanted to change that. Equally blunt, and more surprising, is her claim that areas of particular strength at UVA--like English, Religious Studies, and Spanish--are not fields in which schools would invest today!
UPDATE: You can read the whole document here; I can imagine that this bucket of cold water on the head may not have been well-received by the political hacks on the Board, who were probably in the dark about a lot of this. An excerpt (I've bolded a few really choice lines!):
We face a special challenge in hiring new faculty. Every institution says that it prizes teaching, but the University really does. Virginia’s unique undergraduate experience cannot be maintained with the average PhD being produced in American universities. Despite being excellent scholars and researchers, most of them have little teacher preparation and many of them have little interest in undergraduates. But assessing future research potential – imprecise as it is – is probably more accurate than assessing teaching potential. We have an opportunity here to innovate – perhaps with teaching postdoctoral fellowships or residencies that would allow future faculty to hone their teaching abilities just as the traditional post-doctoral fellowship allows young scientists to hone their research abilities. In addition, we must plan purposefully to socialize new faculty into what is special about Virginia, because it will be too costly and time-consuming merely to assume that the usual market forces will suffice. These issues are rarely addressed today, and run counter to the traditional faculty culture.
Third, the University of Virginia suffers from a reputation gap—or, alternatively, we have somehow been overachieving. In a number of critical areas we are reputed to be better than we actually are. Even simple metrics (number of National Academy Members, members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, International Award Winners) show that we are not as excellent as our rankings imply. Our traditional strengths and international reputation have come from the humanities and the professional schools. The more recent emphasis on science and engineering is interpreted in some quarters as a sign that we will no longer cherish our traditional strengths, and recent political attacks on universities reinforce this fear. Meanwhile, our need to improve STEM fields persists. This situation creates a challenge and a vulnerability that needs to be addressed through substantive and strategic improvements. Some of the changes needed are reasonably easy, such as being much more proactive in nominating our faculty for the honors for which they are eligible. The more enduring improvement will need to be in the area of faculty hiring. Even though we will be searching for faculty who are excellent teachers and mentors, we will still need to find intellectual leaders.
Fourth, we have a fragile “top-ten” standing of some of the professional schools and academic departments. It must be candidly admitted that some of the fields that bring us the greatest distinction are not those in which most people would today invest (e.g., Spanish, English, Religious Studies). In some of these units, our reputation is derived from a small number of faculty, rendering the reputation of those units particularly vulnerable to the outside recruitment of a single person or a few departures of senior leaders. This problem has been accentuated in the last few years by our inability to keep faculty salaries of our best people competitive with those at peer institutions. An examination of the packages used to lure some of these people away from us shows that extraordinary resources are being assembled. A recent offer included a salary increase of more than $100K, subsidized housing and school tuition for dependents, the ability to hire two or three additional faculty of the person’s choosing, and the creation of a new research center as a personal research playground for the former Virginia faculty member.
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