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University of Denial

A lot of people think Larry Summers was forced to resign from Harvard for saying women can't do math. That is BS. When the Teresa Sullivan was abruptly fired from the presidency of the University of Virginia earlier this summer, the explanations offered up by the media were no less ridiculous: it was because Sullivan lacked "strategic dynamism" which was possibly code for "she's too fat to run a school Newsweek had named hottest college for fitness, or maybe the Board was still sore over that Lady Gaga class. But when students and professors returned from summer sabbaticals to protest the ouster on a campus more generally associated with Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and killer lacrosse players, I knew something bigger and more existential was at stake. Specifically, I wondered if the ouster had anything to do with climate science and the state attorney general Kevin Cuccinelli's two year jihad against former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann of "hockey stick" fame. Well, it sure looks like the Board had a bigger beef with climate science than Lady Gaga studies! But now that I've amassed a pretty damning amount of evidence suggesting my instincts were correct, I can only assume the traditional media is persisting with its ridiculous 'Mean Girls' narrative of the clash because it has been intimidated by the over-the-top tantrums and libel lawsuit promises of the coup's conspirators. But while the papers speculate that Sullivan was the victim of "plus sized bullying" from the Board's svelte Rector Helen Dragas, the evidence suggests that UVA has mostly been bullied by its former extension campus—and hotbed of climate science denial—George Mason University. I have no personal stake in UVA's reputation—I rejected it at 17 on grounds it was "too fratty" and was immediately hoisted on my own petard by my first choice University of Pennsylvania—but I do believe it would be a profound loss to my home state if Thomas Jefferson's University went the way of its highly corporatized cousins, so I've been reporting on the saga pro bono at my personal site Das Krapital, dedicated loosely to the mission of unmasking (and mocking) corporate propaganda wherever I can still muster the outrage to do so.
posted by evabraunstein on Aug 25, 2012 - 0 comments

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