This week Teresa Sullivan begins her term as the eighth President of UVA. She walks into a situation dominated by economic challenges and ever-shrinking financial support from the Commonwealth. But that hasn’t kept faculty and staff at the University from crafting a wish list of changes they’d like to see happen under the new Prez.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies at UVA, says incoming president Teresa Sullivan ought to pay particular attention to funding for sciences and the performing arts.
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UVA has been hit with $36.8 million in budget reductions since 2007. Another reduction of at least $14.7 million for the 2011-2012 academic year is on the horizon. For Ann Hamric, professor of Nursing and former chair of the Faculty Senate, “the major issue and my major wish is that we maintain academic excellence in the face of these continuing budget cuts.” She’s cheered to know that Sullivan has already been talking with the Board of Visitors about an alternative financial model.
“I think it’s such a fundamental issue that it is hard to think that we can achieve a lot of other things without it,” says Hamric.
When Sullivan met with UVA deans, she told them to find resources and “take control of them,” says School of Nursing Dean Dorrie Fontaine. Those resources include human capital. “We have got great people here and we should keep an eye out and watch for more good people,” Fontaine says. As far as wishes, Fontaine wants Sullivan to remain curious, adding, “I think she is going to be fabulous.”
In his last State of the University Address in early February, former President John Casteen said that one of the “missed opportunities” during his tenure has been the lack of a proper performance and rehearsal space for the arts. Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate Professor of Media Studies, agrees.
“Most other major state universities have world-class performance spaces for music and drama and our arts infrastructure is embarrassing,” he says. “I saw The Sound of Music at the Heritage Theater Festival a couple of weeks ago at Culbreth Theater and the air conditioning was dripping on the audience. That theater is worse than my high school theater. It’s just an embarrassment.”
Although UVA may be the country’s second-best public university to be an undergraduate, Vaidhyanathan, who has known Sullivan since his graduate school days at the University of Texas, says the same school “is not one of the best places to be a graduate student in physics, or to be a professor of physics.” In fact, according to him, science departments and support for graduate students at UVA pale next to his alma mater and Sullivan’s former employer, the University of Michigan. “When you spend money on the sciences, you are attracting not only more federal grants… but you are also enhancing the potential for licensing patents, generating visibility for the University as well,” he says.
Hamric concurs. Maintaining academic excellence involves “robust graduate student support, it includes enhanced faculty lines and replacing the faculty that we have lost,” she says. “It includes a lot of things that have distinguished the University that have been imperiled by 20 years of eroding state support.”
Even from the student perspective, resources are “a really big problem,” says Colin Hood, student council president. And although times may be tough, Hood hopes that Sullivan will lead the student body through them “and that she will do her best to maintain and hopefully even improve the student experience,” he says.
For Brad Sayler, who provides computer support for the Civil Engineering department, the most important aspect of the new presidency will be trust. “I think that if we could trust the administration to do what they are saying they are doing…then there would be a much better spirit of cooperation here at the University,” he says. In addition to budget and salary transparency, a major wish is to finally have staff representation on the Board of Visitors: “That would be a big step forward.”
Overwhelmingly, Sullivan’s arrival is seen as a fresh start.
“[UVA] is always going to be a charming place full of history and heritage, but it can be so much more. The very fact that Teresa Sullivan is now president of the University she would not have been allowed to attend as an undergraduate shows how far we have come,” says Vaidhyanathan.
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