Apotheosis of a President - Anthropology News

The Sacking and Reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan at the University of Virginia

When anthropologists think of ?collective effervescence? and ?ritual dramas,? we most likely imagine ourselves observing such events, or reading about them in ethnographies, not participating in them. Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself, with no warning, caught up in a political-ritual drama as compelling as anything imagined by Emile Durkheim or described by Victor Turner.

Thousands of people at the University of Virginia (UVa) experienced something similar when we learned, on June 10, 2012, that our trustees, the Board of Visitors (BOV), had asked for and accepted the resignation of our president, Teresa Sullivan. The first female president at UVa, Sullivan had taken up her post less than two years earlier, following the 20-year tenure of the prior president, John Casteen. At the moment of her sacking, Sullivan was widely perceived to be at least competent and not prone to major blunders. The Board?s decision made no sense to the community?which had, I felt, just been beheaded.

Sullivan supporter with image of Thomas Jefferson, on the Lawn at the University of Virginia, June 26, 2012. Photo courtesy John Edwin Mason

Conspiracy theories began to circulate almost immediately, concerning a cabal of business executives on the BOV who wanted to ?corporatize? UVa by replacing our scholar-president, a distinguished sociologist, with an MBA-CEO. Our student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, filed a FOIA request which led to the June 19 release of emails revealing backstage conversations among BOV members who had become infatuated with the latest management theories about ?strategically dynamic? corporate leadership, the revenue-generating potential of online education, and other ways for the institution to become more efficient and ?cutting-edge.?

In the meantime, on June 14 the Faculty Senate, through its executive committee, passed a resolution of no confidence in the BOV and convened an open meeting on June 17 for the entire Senate to ratify it. This was the drama?s first great public event, when more than 800 faculty members came to watch the Senate take its stand. My sense of the meeting was that despite our lack of knowledge (thanks to the vague communications from the BOV and our fears for the worst, people were amazed that so many had come to support President Sullivan?in the summer, no less.

The next afternoon, more than 2,000 faculty members, students, staff and townspeople gathered on the Lawn, the center of UVa?s ?Grounds,? at the foot of the steps leading up to the Rotunda, the most sacred of the Jeffersonian buildings, where the BOV was to meet. About 3:30, Sullivan appeared, followed by an entourage, including the immediate past president of the Faculty Senate holding an umbrella over her. She parted the crowd right down the middle and entered the Rotunda: at that moment, I felt, we had witnessed the apotheosis of a president. Sullivan made her final statement to the Board and departed, speaking only briefly to the crowd. The BOV then went into a closed session which dragged on for eleven hours, voting in the end to appoint Carl Zeithaml, dean of the university?s commerce school, as interim president.

At a press conference, Zeithaml claimed he would not seek the permanent position and that he supported neither Sullivan?s ouster nor the manner in which it had been accomplished. A day later, Zeithaml met with the council of department chairs of Arts and Sciences, which asked him to renounce the interim position, reasoning that to accept it was to lend legitimacy to the process, at a time when the UVa community was united behind Sullivan.

Influenced, I suppose, by the anthropological literature on sacred kingship, I saw in these events a man awed by the mantle that had been offered him, a man wrestling with the socially sacred power of the presidency which he was not sure he knew how to use, even as he was trying to do what he thought was best for UVa. In any case, on Friday, June 22, Zeithaml announced he would not take up the interim post.

The tide, it seemed, was turning, and it was rumored that the BOV would soon meet to reconsider its decision. Sunday, more than 1,500 people gathered on the Lawn for a ?Rally for Honor,? a reference to the university?s student-run honor system. Two days later Sullivan was able to address yet another Lawn crowd with the news that the BOV had reinstated her.

This political-ritual drama elicited the most remarkable expression of UVa?s conscience collective I?d seen in my 26 years there. Still, seemingly unified participants were almost surely animated by different, even conflicting, values. For many faculty members, the BOV?s action was symptomatic of an ongoing neoliberal assault on public institutions, compounded by the anti-intellectualism of the business class. Our gatherings on the Lawn seemed to be our own version of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Yet, on the Lawn were many students and alumni, and some faculty members as well, who may well have supported the intention of the Board to run the university more like a corporation but who nonetheless protested its actions as a violation of the ?community of trust? promised in UVa?s much-touted honor system.

The protestors? appeals to honor almost certainly weighed more heavily on the Board than faculty outcries against corporatization. Honor would have been compelling to the BOV, many of whom are alumni with great devotion to institutional traditions. The values of honor?and an associated Jeffersonian discourse about truth-seeking, also deployed at the rallies?are substantively non-specific but rhetorically powerful.

As Chris Colvin, an American anthropologist and UVa alum now located in South Africa, suggested to me, in similar disputes in that country, his concerns for due process in governance often make little sense to his colleagues, who assume they cannot realistically expect fairness and transparency from their leaders, or in fact the larger system; they focus instead on substantive political demands. At UVa, by contrast, questions of process were paramount, and once the perceived breach of fairness was repaired, the ritual drama was over and the community quickly returned to its routines. In the aftermath, however, the political, administrative, and curricular issues that worried faculty during the drama remain to be faced.

Richard Handler is professor of anthropology and director of the Program in Global Development Studies at the University of Virginia.

Source: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/08/31/apotheosis-of-a-president/

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