Roundup: The University of Virginia Board vs. . . . Everyone

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Sara Hebel, "A UVa Board Member Resigns and a Prominent Faculty Member Leaves in Protest of 'Fiasco,'" Chronicle, June 19, 2012

Ousted UVA president Teresa Sullivan

The vice rector of the University of Virginia board resigned on Tuesday, saying that he hopes his decision will help begin a "needed healing process" at the university, which has been reeling during the past week-and-a-half over the board's decision to force Teresa A. Sullivan, a president popular with faculty and students, from office.>>>

Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Strategic Mumblespeak: Er, UVA’s Teresa Sullivan was fired for what?" Slate, June 15, 2012

. . . . We were all baffled. So Sullivan did nothing wrong? The board would not even hint at the reason she was fired. Conspiracy theories quickly circulated to fill the vacuum. And they got worse after Kiernan’s letter unleashed an unfounded fear that an MBA “cabal” was in cahoots with Goldman Sachs to loot the university.>>>

Zinie Chen Sampson, "UVa vice rector resigns after president's ouster," Guardian, June 19, 2012

The vice rector of the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors resigned Tuesday, saying he wanted to help quell the turmoil surrounding the abrupt ouster of President Teresa Sullivan.>>>

Kevin Kiley, "Going Another Round?" Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2012

After a highly unusual -- arguably unprecedented -- series of events over the past two weeks, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors will meet on the campus Tuesday to reconsider the controversial forced resignation of President Teresa Sullivan.>>>

Marie Griffith, "What Can We Learn from UVA?" Religion & Politics, June 21, 2012

The forced resignation of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, announced June 10, did not go as planned. Pushed out by a faction of the university’s governing body, the Board of Visitors, Sullivan was said to lack vision and “strategic dynamism,” a term appearing in a widely distributed email from Peter Kiernan, the then-chair of UVA’s Darden Business School Foundation Board. (He resigned shortly after the email went public.) Reporting on the forces behind the orchestrated firing, The Washington Post revealed that Sullivan’s Board critics felt she “lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.” Classics and German, “obscure departments”? raged university stakeholders. What else is on the chopping block? Any subject that doesn’t easily lend itself to direct monetary gain?>>>

Exploring Family History

Randall Stephens

This weekend NPR featured an interesting story about one scholar's quest to learn more about his family.

Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1861

"Lawrence Jackson went through most of his life not knowing much about his family history," reports Guy Raz.  Continues Raz:

So he began a search, armed with only early boyhood memories, for his late grandfather's old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs, Va. Jackson describes his journey in a new book, My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War.

Shortly after Jackson began a search for his roots, he found out his great-grandfather was a slave.

"If you said to me that my father's grandfather grew up in slavery and actually spent maybe the first 10 or 15 years of his life as human chattel, I wouldn't have been able to take that idea so seriously" . . . 

This short segment well illustrates how the past still impacts the present.  A course that deals with 19th century US history might make use of stories like this.  In addition programs like Henry Louis Gates' African-American Lives uncover the past in a very personal way.  What better sense could students get of the significance of history?

I'll admit, I've never incorporated a genealogy project into the curriculum.  Yet, stories like these above make me wonder if it would work.