After a summer of drama and controversy concerning her ouster, UVA President Teresa Sullivan says she is not looking back. In her first television interview, Sullivan is talking about how to move the university forward.
Wednesday NBC29's Henry Graff sat down one-on-one with Sullivan, starting the conversation by asking about the future of UVA and why she is not looking back.
"I think people are really concerned about what's the way forward," Sullivan said.
Sullivan says she and the community cannot dwell on the two controversial weeks over the summer, the time from her forced resignation to reinstatement.
"It's clear that the university community wants to know what's going to happen," she stated.
Sullivan says the course ahead is coming into focus, starting with a strategic plan to deal with the erosion of state and federal funding, tuition affordability and emerging technologies. Sullivan will come up with the plan and present it to the UVA Board of Visitors by the end of the academic year.
"I will be leading a steering committee which will take people from numerous groups - from faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents - and have them engaged in helping us think through the plan," she said.
Likely to be included in that plan is a bigger push for online courses. Currently, online teaching is being utilized at UVA and some graduate courses can be taken electronically.
In July, UVA announced it will offer five, non-credit online classes starting next year. So far 60,000 people have already signed up for the free classes.
As for online courses being a potential revenue source, Sullivan says that remains to be seen.
"These are admittedly an experiment and Coursera admits they don't have a business plan for it either," she stated.
On Thursday, Sullivan will present a report concerning faculty pay to the UVA Board of Visitors. It is expected that she will ask to dip into the endowment fund. Sullivan says it is just a proposal and will not ask the board to vote on it Thursday.
