Pat... thank you for writing. This one is close to me. - I'm a current UVa student and I've been following the events of the past week with some horror and amusement. The little coup appears to be fading, the wind is shifting and Rector Dragas emails are growing ever more desperate. I expect Sullivan will return next week and Dragas will retreat in obscurity building luxury homes back in Virginia Beach. I hope she stays there. Her ideas will linger though, that's the painful part. UVa takes great pride in the Commerce School, our undergraduate MBA. It's a two year program, two years of trade school for those souls willing to give up the latter half of their liberal arts education. Poor trade in my estimation, but then I'm one of those 'poor saps' who studies history and enjoys literature. I'm not one of those 'bold leaders' who'll bring 'strategic dynamism' to the world. I missed the chapter where Churchill took a few years off to get that Harvard MBA. Anyway... I've worked with people who've gone through the program. Many are smart, they could have taken other paths but they came to the conclusion that life is about money and they understood that Commerce was the quickest ticket to that first million. It probably is. I think they're selling themselves short, but then we all make our own mistakes. You can't save people. God knows I'm a fool about something myself. The other half, well. It just makes me sad. There are quite a few people here who aren't particularly gifted but they're stubborn and to their credit they work awfully hard. They slave themselves to the material and learn it to the exclusion of all else. The product is something awful, It just kills me in during a group project when someone gets up to talk and they just unload this useless gibberish. They utter phrases like 'creative destruction' as if it meant something real and drone on about leadership theory. They can't write, not in the way Mark Twain understood it. They also can't think, not the way generations of scholars understand the term. Instead they've learned the rubric for product optimization and how to price that 20oz soda just right. -I hope for our sakes that this isn't the future of education. Eliot
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Thank you! As has been suggested here, I am at least as concerned for my alma mater, VMI, as for the University. From the Post today, I see that the governor, fulfilling the role for which we have governors in Virginia has moved to end this immediate mess by telling the visitors that if they don't "fix" it next week he will remove them all and appoint a new board. Perhaps this time he can appoint a more varied group that includes a wide variety of people who could contribute to the ongoing story of U. Va.'s grand tradition. pl
