SK Multi-Hyphenate

#FreeCooperUnion

I participated in and documented the rally at Cooper Union tonight in support of the student and faculty sit-in of the president's office (ongoing as I post this). After more than a century of being free of charge, the school now plans to charge tuition. My Storify.

Derek Walcott's 'A Far Cry From Africa'

My notes for teaching this great poem about the author's conflicting heritages vis-á-vis the struggle for Kenyan independence. I used the poem to kick off my English-composition class this semester at BMCC, which is loosely organized around postcolonialism.

'Zero Dark Thirty,' Torture, and Aesthetics

So America finally got to see the film that Glenn Greenwald, Jane Mayer, Dianne Feinstein, and other reactionaries don't want anyone to watch: Zero Dark Thirty, which racked up $24 million in its first weekend of national release. Although the relentless criticism of the film's depiction of torture appears to be poisoning its Oscar chances—director Kathryn Bigelow was snubbed for a nod, and last night's Golden Globe for best drama went to the faux-political film Argo—the groupthink clearly hasn't deterred audiences, whom Zero Dark Thirty is for, after all. Indeed, the film grippingly reminds American viewers of what the U.S. government has done in our names—but without our consent—in the "war on terror": torture, yes, but also the illegal extraterritorial "black site" detainee program that undergirded it. Why, then, are the film's critics in denial about what it shows?

Emphasis on "shows": visual media is uniquely able to represent for our eyes to see what otherwise can only be conjured by words. This is a fact that the film's critics, who apparently don't think about aesthetics much, constantly miss. And there's been plenty written about the indefensible tactics of post-9/11 superpower warfare, such as Mayer's invaluable 2008 book The Dark Side, not to mention the 6,000 pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture—that is, if it ever sees the light of day. In contrast, what Zero Dark Thirty shows, as Manohla Dargis puts it, is the "dark side" itself—or, at least, as best as it can be imagined "based on first-hand accounts," as the film's preface states.

That proviso, of course, has also been attacked, as if no aesthetic work had ever utilized journalistic or insider knowledge. Nevertheless, the film—a docudrama—has primarily been faulted for not being journalistic enough—for the ways it "distorts" history, as Mayer asserted in her condemnation of the film. But that's exactly what aesthetic work, at its best, does: it distorts received facts into affective experiences impossible to achieve for strictly evidentiary narratives.

And the affective experience of Zero Dark Thirty is profound: because the film corresponds to a certain reality—that is, it's not completely made up—we are in effect seeing torture, and we must reckon with the affects of such witnessing. The brutal interrogation scenes are representations of torture and not documentations of it, yes, but failing a leak of CIA footage, we're never going to see exactly what happened in the black sites of the war on terrorism. (It bears reminding here of the important service provided by the original incarnation of WikiLeaks: revealing the secrets governments desperately want to keep.)

How else are we to witness waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" if not aesthetically? How else are we to feel whatever it is we feel—rage, nausea, indifference—as we watch the first detainee in the film, Ammar, beaten, nearly drowned, or shoved into a box? The character may be a composite, but real detainees were subjected to such suffering—and aside from the Abu Ghraib photos, we have few images of what these prisoners went through.

This is the great power of Zero Dark Thirty: it shows us what we haven't seen. It's a uniquely aesthetic contribution to the multi-dimensional debate about torture that the film has reignited, itself a salutary effect. Bigelow and her partner Mark Boal have people talking about the ethics of U.S. military power again, at a time when the lightning rod for that topic, however unconductive, has been drones, whose use has greatly expanded under Obama. And let's remember, the Guantánamo detention facility remains open, with 166 "enemy combatants" illegally and indefinitely detained there. It's been four years since our president promised to close the site, and yet no one seems to care.

Indeed, in their zeal for whether Zero Dark Thirty promulgates the efficacy of torture (which it doesn't, as a careful reading of the film, such as Dargis's, makes clear), the film's critics have failed to consider the larger contours of extraterritoriality that allowed the torture to happen in the first place. Precisely because torture is illegal under federal law, it had to occur outside U.S. jurisdiction, as the film plainly shows.

And though torture has supposedly stopped (one never knows with the CIA), the extraterritorial precedent lives on, not only at Gitmo but also in the drone program. Instead of besmirching the film, its critics should be lauding it for its complete and total exposure, to use Andrew Sullivan's word, of Bush's—and Obama's—unethical prosecution of terrorism. It reveals the "unethics" of U.S. government decisions in the way that only a film can.

Of course, in addition to visceral representations, film also offers the benefit of much wider reach than a book or op-ed, as Zero Dark Thirty's box office this weekend confirms. Part of the appeal of Zero Dark Thirty, after all, is the chase for and eventual killing of "UBL," and Bigelow and Boal adroitly deploy suspense to marshal their exposé forward. That's what draws viewers, especially those who might otherwise shy away from brutal scenes of torture.

Altogether, the affective impact of watching those scenes combined with the pull of suspense made me feel complicit in the torture, which, of course, I am—or was. That's a complicated feeling that no American can easily resolve, as Jessica Chastain's character indicates when she bursts into sobs after her mission is complete. Displacing it on to the filmmakers, as the film's critics seem to do, only prevents the individual affective work that could, maybe, begin to remediate the unethics of U.S. foreign policy. Far from ratifying our government's tactics against terrorism, then, Zero Dark Thirty powerfully challenges them.

Florent Morellet on Historic Preservation and NYC

"You can't preserve everything," Florent Morellet, pioneering meat-market restaurateur, said Thursday night at a Historic Districts Council screening of the 2009 documentary about the rise and fall of his eponymous French diner. The stories of Morellet, his restaurant (which closed in '08), and the meat market have been well told over the years, but the Frenchman's rebirth as a quasi-anti-preservationist could be fresh narrative terrain: Now a member of the community board that serves the neighborhood, Soho, in which he lives, Morellet professed to have lost interest in the meatpacking district, having turned his attention instead to high-rises, urban density, and sustainability.

"It's not about the buildings, it's about the people," he ramblingly opined after the screening at the Tribeca Film Center. "That's what we as preservationists have to think about. High rise is the future, that's what's sustainable. We have to start leveling the suburbs and bringing them to the city, to the core, where there's transit. Apartment buildings of 100 stories! Going against that is immoral, because it's green."

Not exactly the talking points of New York's historic-preservation community, whose latest success is getting a distinctly low-rise section of the East Village landmarked, but that's part of Morellet's charm: he's unpredictable.

He's also, again, ahead of the trend. "There should be high rises on the avenues of the East Village," he said—and along the northern reaches of Third Avenue, there already are.

Manifesto for a Kairological History of Architecture*

*Or, Why I Like BLDG BLOK

Last night I participated in the inaugural public event of BLDG BLOK, a start-up housed at the DUMBO NYU-Poly incubator that's using mapping and other digital tools to rediscover urban history. My task was to respond creatively to a history of Tompkins Square by writer Francis Morrone; I had five minutes, or about 1200 words. Following is what I wrote and read.

When I think of Tompkins Square, I think of rats. Two summers ago, the square—or park, or gathering place, or historical site, or whatever you deem the most appropriate description of the space for your needs—was infested with rats, as local parents complained to media; their burrows—the rats’ burrows, that is, not the parents’ burrows, which are a different kind of burrow—ran adjacent to the playground on the square’s west side. At night you could see the rats scrambling over the mulch, or venturing across the Avenue A sidewalk to pick through garbage. Rats are shy animals—they disappear if you get too close. But they need humans to survive.

*

During the rat infestation—I understand it’s lessened now—I happened to live, just for a short time, on Seventh Street between A and B, which is the south side of Tompkins Square. Accordingly, I had many opportunities to observe the rats. I was interested in photographing them, I guess to capture them, to hold them in time for longer than a moment—that is, permanently. In one photograph I took, there were 22 pairs of rat eyes glinting in the dark. Stopped in the image, they seemed to look at me with the same mix of curiosity and fear with which I gazed at them.

*

Rats are as much a part of New York City history—of any city’s history—as they are a part of my history in New York. Twelve years ago, shortly after I moved to this metropolis, I hit a rat with my foot as I crossed Broadway on Fourth Street. I didn’t see the rat—I just felt a soft, semi-squishy thud. Immediately a high-pitched screech overcame the corner; I looked down and saw a furry oblong scurry away zig-zag-like. Passersby glared at me as I stood there, stunned, as if I’d been hit by a car—an unexpectedly traumatic collision. But I might as well have collided with history itself.

*

Rats, as we know, are ancient animals—so ancient that the zoological designation “Old World rats” for the black and brown rodents we live with in cities doesn’t refer to the pre-modern era but to the pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-modern era: specifically, the Pleistocene epoch, which began more than two million years ago and ended eleven-thousand-and-seven-hundred years ago. At some point during this enormous span of time—scientists aren’t sure when—the rats that now commingle with us and our refuse in Tompkins Square originated in the forests and scrublands of Asia. Our rats, of course, aren’t a million years old (obviously)—their average life span is only a year. But their bodies carry within them a history of the world, both spatial and temporal. They’re living documents of human civilization. Don’t believe me? Ask the next rat you see. He’ll tell you if he could.

*

Like rats, architecture carries within it a spatial-temporal history of the world, only you can’t stop a building—a design—in its tracks with your foot. As eminent architectural writer Francis Morrone reminds us in his chronological history, the area that’s now Tompkins Square was once a swampy mass filled with birds of the snipe variety; Manhatten men of a certain stripe hunted them. The snipe hunt later became synonymous with the wild-goose chase, a madcap search for an ostensibly real but actually fictional object. Indeed, that meaning is so prevalent today that to use “snipe hunting” to refer to a kind of bird hunting would be archaic. And yet this seemingly outmoded definition is embedded in the phrase; it can’t be separated out. Etymologies are not linear but coextensive—meanings are ever present.

*

When I think about architecture, I often find myself thinking of Orhan Pamuk’s incredible novel Snow, in which the provenance and style of buildings are as important as any other theme. After years of living in exile in Germany, the novel’s protagonist, a poet, returns to Turkey for his mother’s funeral. Subsequently, he’s offered a reporting assignment that takes him to the eastern city of Kars, a remote outpost of have’s and have-not’s—mostly have-not’s. His first stop in town is the Snow Palace Hotel, an “elegant Baltic building…two stories high, with long narrow windows that looked out onto a courtyard and an arch that led out to the street. The arch was 110 years old and high enough for horse-drawn carriages to pass through with ease.” When the poet-reporter walks under the arch, he feels “a shiver of excitement.”

*

The novel takes place in the 1990s. A hundred-and-ten years before then—in the 1880s—Kars belonged to the Russian empire, and Turkey, as a nation, didn’t yet exist. At the beginning of that same decade, Tompkins Square had become a public park—“one of the most attractive spots in the city,” as the New-York Tribune hailed it. Within 60 years, however, the park was no longer attractive: as the New York Times noted—and these references are Morrone’s, by the way—neglect was visible everywhere, the playground vandalized.

*

Kars—you may have sensed I was going here—suffered a similar degradation: “elegant Baltic buildings” turn out to be a rarity in the city as rendered by Pamuk in Snow. Instead, as the novel’s poet-reporter walks through the snow, he finds “decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window,” a “thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators,” and “a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge,” where a “pack of dogs bark[ed] at every passerby.” The forlorn scenes force our man to wonder if Kars is “a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

*

I read this moment, fictional or not, as the end of history—the end of a progressive chronology of the world that relegates the past to the past—forgotten. In contrast to a chronological view of history, I propose a kairological perspective, in which the past is never forgotten but always insistently here. In this regard, I follow the great Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, who declares: “Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar historicism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of concrete human experience; instead of the chronological time of pseudo-history, the [k]airological time of authentic history; in place of the total social process of a dialectic lost in time, the interruption and immediacy of dialectic at a standstill.”

*

Architecture can interrupt this dialectic of putative progress, as can rats. So can, perhaps ironically, the digital—or digitality, or technology, or invention, or whatever you want to call it—which makes visible simultaneous—kairological—historical experiences. This is what BLDG BLOK does, and this is why I like it.

The East 10th Street Historic District—Building 2

Moving west to east, the second building of the East 10th Street Historic District, number 295 (above), is part of the same set of houses that includes 293 and ends with 299. All built in a Greek Revival/Italianate style, they're attributed to the architect Joseph Trench. As before, this building incorporates Queen-Anne-style alterations, such as the cornice; the main entrance was also moved to the basement.

Previously: The East 10th Historic District—Photos

The East 10th Street Historic District—Photos

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously this past January to elevate the north side of East 10th Street between Avenues A and B to the status of historic district. The district contains 26 buildings, most of which were built in the 1840s, '50s, and '60s, following the opening of Tompkins Square Park, which the buildings face, in 1834. A few of the buildings went up around the turn of the twentieth century, including the McKim, Mead, & White-designed public library at 331 East 10th.

These buildings, though not the library, have been altered greatly since their construction, and as such they're fascinating historical assemblages. I live near the block, and since I'm addicted to Instagram, I thought I'd photograph and post each of the 26 structures. Above is building one, on the northwest corner of the block: 293 East 10th. Originally built (circa 1846) in a Greek Revival/Italianate style, it was later updated with a Queen Anne-style cornice. (This information, and all subsequent information about these buildings, comes from the East 10th Street Historic District "designation report," prepared for the preservation commission.) Other alterations—they are numerous, as you can glean from the image—include moving the main entrance to the basement and removing the window lintels. The current occupant of the storefront is the Horus Cafe and hookah lounge, which has a sidewalk cafe.

An Open Letter to the UVA Board Re Sullivan

You don't have to do this. At your special meeting Monday at 3, you don't have to ratify the corrupt decision by a cabal of three of your members—plus martyred Kiernan and unnamed shadowy advisers—to remove President Sullivan from Mr. Jefferson's great university. Jefferson—we like to talk about him a lot, don't we?—believed in democratic ideals; he founded the University to embody them. He was resolutely and authoritatively against tyranny. But what happened last weekend was tyrannical: a secret conspiracy by an ultra-small but powerful minority to defy the wishes of a very large majority—that is, the UVA community.

The backlash that's grown daily since last weekend's coup profoundly illustrates two facts that you, board members, must consider before voting on President Sullivan's forced "resignation": 1) the University community supports President Sullivan and opposes the secretive process used to depose her. 2) The cabal's actions have substantially injured the University both internally and externally. If President Sullivan was acting too slowly to improve UVA, as the cabal's leader—you know her as rector—has suggested, then the cabal acted swiftly to wreck the University. The negative effects can be seen everywhere: the Faculty Senate executive council's no-confidence vote; the instantaneous feedback to the specially created Alumni Association comment site that "overwhelmed [the] servers" in less than 30 minutes; the newspaper editorials; the criticism from the head of the Association of American Universities, a group of 61 top universities to which the University belongs—but perhaps not for long, if the cabal gets its way.

Furthermore, by all accounts, President Sullivan was leading the University in fine form—indeed, as her May strategy memo shows, she was closely engaged with both strategic and tactical issues that had been left to fester under previous administrative and board leadership. In response to this and much other evidence of President Sullivan's sound stewardship, the cabal has offered nothing. Before you vote on Monday, you might ask the cabal if they have a reason for dismissing President Sullivan. It appears that they lack one. Instead, they seem to just want change for the sake of change—hardly a rational basis for such a deleterious upheaval, wouldn't you agree? In contrast to President Sullivan, the cabal has betrayed its poor stewardship of the University.

The cabal's leader quoted Jefferson in her announcement of the coup last Sunday: "The great object of our aim from the beginning has been to make this Establishment the most eminent in the United States." With your vote tomorrow, board members, you have the great privilege of keeping the University of Virginia on its upward track by rejecting President Sullivan's forced resignation. She may not want to continue her tenure, given all that's happened. (If she didn't continue, it would be understandable but sad, especially since it needn't have come to this.)

But whether she stays or goes, you would, in rejecting her resignation, show the state, and the country, that UVA can't be bullied by a self-interested tyrannical cabal that sows discord instead of progress. To operate at their best, public universities need transparent, rational governing boards. Please show that you belong to such a board by rejecting President Sullivan's resignation and standing up for Jefferson's own ideals.

Respectfully,

Sean Kennedy

CLAS 2000

Related: UVA, Sullivan, & the Renegade Board

Related: UVA, Sullivan, & Online Education

UVA, Sullivan, & Online Education

I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but unfortunately the one about Goldman Sachs's embattled Education Management Corporation and the UVA coup isn't true. According to the theory proposed by my fellow UVA alum Anne-Marie Angelo, President Sullivan was sacked because she declined to go into business with EDMC. As Angelo writes, EDMC

wanted to make or made a bid to offer online education through UVA. From this endeavor, EMC [sic] would invest profits back into the University, helping to heal some of the University’s fiscal woes. When Sullivan was reluctant or refused to agree to the venture, key members of the Board threatened litigation related to her performance as a fundraiser for the University.

But this couldn't have happened, for several reasons:

1) EDMC has been embroiled in multiple legal proceedings, including an ongoing "multibillion-dollar fraud suit" brought by the Justice Department and four states. Along with the market-leading University of Phoenix, EDMC is a caricature of for-profit education unscrupulousness. What university, public or private, would go near EDMC given its radioactive status? Sullivan could've been cited for negligence per her employment contract.

2) EMDC doesn't provide online-education services to extant institutions like UVA: it creates and runs its own universities, most of which are online. (It has four main brands: the Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, and South University.) Accordingly, it would be unprecedented for the company to offer services "through" UVA. EMDC doesn't license other university brands.

3) Angelo says an EMDC investor presentation occurred in the Charlottesville area this February or March, but the exact details are unclear. According to an EMDC press release, there were indeed investor presentations in February and March (as there are at other times of the year), but they occurred in Boston and Arizona; furthermore, they were investor presentations, not meetings with universities seeking EMDC's services.

4) The "online education" to which Sullivan subscribed per her leaked strategic memo is clearly a "hybrid" course model, in which some introductory classes would contain an online element. Sullivan wasn't referring to any sort of Virginia-branded online education that might be offered for profit—nor has any such suggestion surfaced from others.

5) Within a wider context of peer institutions, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Penn, and Michigan have so far embarked on free online courses for non-matriculated students. If UVA wanted to keep pace, it would take a similar approach and not strike out on its own into the uncertain for-profit sphere.

Based on these facts, it's impossible to see how EDMC played any role in Sullivan's ouster. Indeed, it seems dubious at best that online education itself influenced Dragas's actions. Sullivan's strategic memo certainly shows that she was attuned to online solutions as one way of closing the "reputation gap" that previous university leadership, both administrators and the board, had allowed to develop.

(NB: Dragas was appointed to the board in 2008 and served on the presidential search committee that led to Sullivan's election. So did former rector Thomas Farrell, who some have speculated is interested in the UVA presidency. Farrell runs the Dominion power company, on whose board Dragas and vice-rector Mark Kington sit. Farrell also chairs Virginia's Higher Education Commission.)

As for the real reason Dragas took the action she did, that remains a mystery. As Angelo notes, the board of visitors met in closed "executive" session at its February 2012 meeting to discuss "personnel matters" regarding fundraising and gifts to the university's ongoing capital campaign. At the same meeting, the minutes reveal, a host of changes to the board's manual were approved, including this:

The President shall promote the development of the endowment funds of the University and shall be authorized to accept any gift or grant subject to the approval of the Governor as required, making a report to the Board of such gifts or grants

But though the capital campaign missed its target last year, total philanthropic giving was up almost 14% in the first two quarters of the university's current fiscal year from the previous year. In the third quarter, however, the gain was only 3.25% year over year. (See the board minutes here.) This slowdown, combined with the missed capital-campaign target, may have triggered Dragas and her backers "strategic dynamism" (bye, Kiernan!).

Who knows—the Sullivangate scandal turns more bizarro by the day.

Related: "UVA, Sullivan, & the Renegade Board"

UVA, Sullivan, & the Renegade Board

The 1895 Rotunda fire. Image courtesy the University of Virginia Library.

"This is the most egregious case I have ever seen of mismanagement by a governing board. It's secretive, it's misguided and based on the public statements, there's no clear rationale.” Hunter Rawlings, president of the Association of American Universities

"We encourage all of us, even as we adjust and absorb this change, to focus constructively forward in preparing the institution for its next stage of leadership..." University of Virginia provost John Simon and COO Michael Strine

On day five of the UVA debacle, in which the university's renegade board acted unilaterally and secretly to oust President Teresa Sullivan after less than two years on the job, the gap between perceptions only grows. The university's board of visitors, on the one hand, remains insular and tight-lipped, its effort at damage control now engulfing Sullivan's two hand-picked executives, Simon and Strine. (Their message posted to the university's website has been likened to a "hostage" stunt, and rightfully so. Earlier this week, Simon, formerly of Duke, called Sullivan "one of the stars" of higher education and said they had "all kinds of projects in the works" to "advance" the university. He and Strine should do the right thing and resign, though both presumably are under consideration for the interim presidency. Ethical failures everywhere at the top of Mr. Jefferson's university!) On the other hand, more and more observers both inside and outside UVA, typified by Rawlings of the AAU, are seeing the board's coup for what it is: something rotten in the state of Virginia. UPDATE: This afternoon the executive council of UVA's faculty senate "unanimously declared"it had no confidence in Dragas, vice-rector Mark Kington, or the entire board of visitors.

Simon and Strine's encouragement (thanks!) to "focus constructively forward" is plainly disingenous: how can anyone in the university community think constructively when we don't have any facts? Constructive, collaborative engagement occurred during the process to select Sullivan as president, the result of a 19-member search committee that was half board members, half faculty (six of them), students, and alumni. Yet the decision to remove Sullivan apparently rested with one person, board rector Helen Dragas, a real-estate developer. Dragas may know about business, but she has no higher education credentials. What she does have are connections to UVA's Darden School of Business, being not only an alumna but also a confidant of the Darden foundation's chairman, Peter Kiernan. Update: Kiernan resigned this afternoon, thus further isolating Dragas. (See another UVA alumna's provocative discredited theory about the possible role of Goldman Sachs's for-profit online education sideline in Sullivan's ouster; Kiernan is a former GS partner.) What is it that Dragas, Kiernan, and others have to hide that they can't offer any specifics about Sullivan's ouster? All Dragas does is issue meaningless sleight-of-hand remarks that exemplify Stein's mystical description of her hometown of Oakland: "There is no there there."

I, too, am a UVA alum, and I remain involved in university affairs through my membership on the board of directors of the Serpentine Society, the LGBTQ alumni interest group, which I currently co-chair. I have a stake in the university's well-being as much as anyone. But I'm also dismayed by Sullivan-gate as an emerging academic—I've taught at Rutgers University and I'm beginning the PhD English program at the CUNY Graduate Center. I keenly feel an affinity with Virginia faculty who describe themselves, correctly, as the "stewards of [the] mission of higher education." I'm also a Rutgers grad—I earned my MFA there this May—so I'm a double product of public institutions. As New Jersey's flagship undergoes its own turmoil regarding the power of governing boards, UVA is a sad example of the damage a group of political appointees can do when unfettered by limits.

At UVA, people like to talk about two things: Jefferson's legacy, and the university's stature among peer institutions. The renegade board's abject ouster of Sullivan is a detriment to both, and will likely remain injurious for some time. In explaining Sullivan's removal, Kiernan of the Darden foundation referred three times to "strategic dynamism," an empty management euphemism for purposeless explosion. (Perhaps Kiernan had seen Prometheus, which repeatedly invokes the false notion of destruction for the sake of creation.) But as the university's own history reminds us, dynamite usually has unintended consequences, as manifest in this moment as in 1895, when the Rotunda—the centerpiece and symbol of UVA—was felled by fire. In order to save the now-landmarked structure, an engineering professor "tried dynamiting the bridge" between it and its annex. The result, however, was even more disastrous:

Unfortunately, this blew a hole in the Rotunda, and the fire spread more rapidly. Before it could be brought under control, the annex, dome and interior of the Rotunda had been destroyed. Only the Rotunda’s charred circular brick walls remained.

As the University of Virginia suffers from another dynamic calamity, I fear we onlookers are as helpless as those who watched the Rotunda burn from inside out. There's no way to undo the board's fiat; Sullivan will get a job elsewhere, no doubt at a "peer institution" (that is, competitor). If the current board remains, the replacement president could only be a lackey. Dragas and her cronies maintain their interest is only fiduciary, but instead they've set the whole university ablaze. For UVA's sake—and for the ideal of higher education—I hope they don't remain. We need a new board—one capable of governing.