In case you aren’t a Chronicle subscriber, here’s the relevant portion from today’s article — and why are we reading trustees’ private emails??
On June 10, Ms. Sullivan and the board announced her resignation.
Among the articles that Ms. Dragas and Mr. Kington shared was an opinion piece that appeared in The Chronicle, expressing the need for innovation in higher education and warning of the consequences of resisting change. The article, by Ann Kirschner, university dean of the City University of New York’s honors college, said college leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it’s too late.
“Good article” was the subject line of the e-mail, sent less than a week before Ms. Sullivan resigned, in which Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington the article.
Similarly, Ms. Dragas sent Mr. Kington an message a few days earlier in which the subject line read, “good piece in WSJ today—why we can’t afford to wait.”
The Wall Street Journal piece was written by John E. Chubb, interim chief executive of Education Sector, an independent think tank, and a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and by Terry M. Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at Hoover. They wrote about edX, in which Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined to host free online courses, and about “higher education’s online revolution” more broadly.
“The nation, and the world, are in the early stages of a historic transformation,” they wrote, “in how students learn, teachers teach, and schools and school systems are organized.”
Earlier, in May, Mr. Kington sent Ms. Dragas an opinion piece from The New York Times byDavid Brooks about “the campus tsunami.” In it, Mr. Brooks argued that “what happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web and online learning.”
Ms. Dragas thanked Mr. Kington and said, “I have others like this from The Chronicle of Higher Education that I’ll share with you.” She went on to say that she had had “interesting discussions” with the university’s executive vice president and its executive vice president and provost “that I look forward to sharing with you next week.”