Of the many criticisms University of Virginia governing board leader Helen Dragas offered UVA administration before her decision to fire UVA president Teresa Sullivan (the board, after facing extensive protests from students and faculty, eventually reinstated Sullivan) one had to do with a UVA course focused on the singer Lady Gaga.
According to an article by Jenna Johnson in the Washington Post:
On Dec. 9, governing board leader Helen E. Dragas sent an e-mail to Sullivan and Provost John Simon with the subject line: “tough headline.” All that was in the message was a link to a blog post by The Heritage Foundation headlined, “The Lady Gaga-fication of Higher Ed.” (The piece questioned why four top-tier universities — “Four!” — offered courses revolving around pop icon Lady Gaga. U-Va. was singled out.)
The course, taught by a UVA graduate student, was a writing class called “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity,” and explored how the musician “pushed social boundaries in her work.” After academics sent the board member information about the course she responded that while she understood the “framework and the core purpose of the course” she believed the title of the course “probably aren’t’ helping us justify funding requests from taxpayers, parents, and legislators.”
I have actually made fun of a Lady Gaga-based sociology course offered by the University of South Carolina before, but this level of involvement strikes me as pretty meddlesome.
Dragas wrote in a follow up email that:
Opinions will, of course, vary on curricular content and direction, but there must be some internal arbiter of what is appropriate. I don’t purport to know what that is but it is clear to me that others do (at least purport to know) and that those people can influence our future. We should be mindful of that in my opinion.
Isn’t the “framework and the core purpose of the course” the fundamental reason for its existence? And isn’t the internal arbiter the provost? There was no problem there.
