Those associated with the university [of Virginia] want to protect it from further harm, but an official policy that limits dissent is a ham-handed attempt to do so. The provision has since been removed from the latest draft, posted on the university's website, which reflects a more thoughtful approach.
It is worrisome to think that board members wouldn't want to confront hard questions head-on— especially when posed by their colleagues. Debate about the school, its mission and its future should be encouraged. Such discussion makes for a more focused and successful institution of higher learning.
Daily Press
We applaud the rector’s actions; but much of what remains in the draft proposal is still problematic, in our opinion. One problem area, for example, is the call for Visitors to refrain, basically, from micro-managing UVa’s administration. Requests for institutional data “should be rare, for example, and there must be respect for the institutional chain of command. Both, by the way, were complaints stemming from former Rector Dragas’ relationship with Sullivan. At the core of this latest bit of dysfunction at UVa’s top leadership levels is a cancer in danger of going metastatic. A governance consultant to the board said the body is “not a team, not collegial and not unified.” A damning diagnosis if ever there was one one.
News & Advance
There’s an election yarn spun up in Highland County about the old man from up in the mountains who showed up to vote one Election Day and found the ballots had already been counted. Whether the story is true, or merely a tall tale, doesn’t really matter for our purposes here. It goes like this: The voting in this precinct took place in a building with no electricity. Election officials there would typically count the votes by candlelight. On this particular Election Day though, many years ago, all but one voter had already shown up by midafternoon to cast a ballot. Night was soon coming, and the election officials were eager to wrap things up and get home. They concluded the one missing voter — let’s call him Old Man McGrump — was unlikely to make it down from the mountains, so they went ahead and counted the votes. Naturally, that’s when the old man showed up to vote — and election officials were flummoxed about how he could do so without them knowing who he had voted for. In the local telling of the tale, that’s where it ends — with a round of guffaws about old-time politics out in the country. Except it doesn’t end there, because we a have very live example playing out down in Radford. Or is it Montgomery County?
Roanoke Times