More than two weeks after pressuring her to resign, the University of Virginia governing board has unanimously voted to reinstate Teresa Sullivan as president.

The Washington Post:

“We have both come to the conclusion that it’s time to bring the U-Va. family back together,” [Rector and board chair Helen] Dragas told the Board of Visitors. It was a startling reversal for a board leader who had been steadfast in her insistence that Sullivan was moving too slowly to address fiscal and academic challenges.

What does it all mean?

Too many things for me to say before another cup of coffee. But one point does occur to me: That, as with Larry Summers’ time at Harvard, the appointment of an arrogant leader who thinks that he or she can remake a university using private-sector principles and force of will doesn’t work.

Helen Dragas runs a family business that builds condominiums; she apparently is quite good at this. She has no particular background in higher education. But she does have a lot of political connections.

So I think there is a lesson here: that as universities, whether public or private, lust after greater engagement with the private sector, they risk being thought of and getting treated like the private sector.

Which probably isn’t what they really want.

The reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan is a victory for academic values. But I think it’ll be the exception more than the rule, and for this, universities can largely blame themselves.

Jeff Selingo, who’s the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, explores some of these issues in an op-ed that ran in yesterday’s Times. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but I think he’s right when he says this:

Other information industries, from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight. We now know how those industries have been transformed by technology, resulting in the decline of the middleman — newspapers, record stores, bookstores and publishers.

Colleges and universities could be next…

Selingo emphasizes that universities have to focus more on technology and online education. I’m not so sure that this is the answer. I think universities have to remind the country of what they do well and why they do it; what their values are. But the silence on this from the leaders of the top universities—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—has been deafening, and in large part I think this is because they are all compromised, whether from buckraking on corporate boards, starting branches in states that don’t adhere to principles of free speech, or running a university that’s essentially an adjunct to Silicon Valley.

Where is the university president who’ll stand up and say that in an era of profound international change and upheaval, this is why American universities—and a liberal arts education— matter more than ever?