Mr. Jefferson's university breaks up

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by David L. Kirp, Patrick S. Roberts

The road to autonomy

Virginians are passionate about their leading universities, and for those who manage them this is both a blessing and a curse. In a state with neither a major city nor a major-league franchise in any sport, the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary are a point of pride. Virginia politicians are passionate as well, although their feelings can run to venomousness. Legislative battles turn into culture wars over the content of the curriculum. The green eyeshade crowd in

Richmond closely monitors university budgets, and until a few years ago, the state mandated a payroll system the complexity of which would startle Rube Goldberg. In the mid 1990s, then-governor George Allen specifically picked members of the State Council of Higher Education who had the intention of wreaking havoc.

"The problem," says former U.Va. Provost Peter Low, "is that the state contributes [a small fraction] of the revenue but wants 100 percent control." When in the spring of 2001 the state legislature failed to adopt a budget, $100 million in construction projects on the Charlottesville campus were halted for six months. "It's not like Michigan," says Ted Snyder, who taught there before coming to Virginia as Darden's dean. "You feel the state on a week-to-week basis.

Despite its abiding interest, the state of Virginia has never been especially generous in funding higher education. Even during the 1970s and early 1980s, as the University of Virginia was cultivating an image as one of the "public Ivies," it spent considerably less than neighboring North Carolina. During the recession of the early 1990s, higher education in Virginia fared among the worst of the nation's public universities, suffering a 13 percent budget cut in two years. Out of necessity, the university dramatically increased tuition--by 79 percent for in-state students, and 123 percent for out-of-state students-- making it one of the nation's most expensive public institutions.

Politicians began meddling with tuition in 1994, when legislators limited increases to the rate of inflation. Two years later, Governor Allen imposed a tuition freeze. The budget pinch was so tight that the state's institutions could not offer faculty competitive salaries, and many talented professors went elsewhere.

Several ex-governors, both Democrat and Republican, issued a warning that the quality of public higher education was in real danger. For their part, the university presidents delivered an ultimatum: If Virginia didn't do a better job of funding higher education, some units of the university would go private. "We all sat down and argued about this in John's [U.Va. president John Casteen's] living room," recalls Gordon Davies, who for 20 years headed the State Council of Higher Education. "One of the presidents said, 'Christ, you really mean this.'"

The law and business schools at U.Va. were already committed to privatization. Even though the campus administration had always treated Darden as a favored child--it was viewed as a bright light in an institution whose units are of decidedly uneven caliber--there was never enough state money to underwrite a truly first-rate business school. By the 1980s, recalls long-time chief operating officer Leonard Sandridge, an accreditation team from the Association of American Law Schools had warned that "the law school is in serious danger of falling behind its peers because of a lack of money." A similarly blunt message was being delivered to Darden: To be more than a good regional institution, the business school had to raise buckets of money.