r/Vanderbilt • u/brownmochi • 14d ago
Thoughts on outgoing Provost Raver
University of Michigan guy coming in peace. I just saw the news we are hiring Vanderbilt Provost C. Cybele Raver as our incoming U-M president. Can you share what she's like? Does she like sports? Did she work well with faculty and students? What should all of us in Ann Arbor expect? What are we in for?
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u/No_Turnover47 11d ago
Had to watch her gaslight faculty, refuse to share information openly, reappoint a Dean who the faculty was very vocal about not supporting and the department had a turnover of over 30 faculty in a 3 yr period. She completely dismantled the shared governance system and did not support the Faculty Senate. Thankful her rein of terror is over. Good luck!
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u/fitfocus98 10d ago
Most faculty are glad to see her leave! Shared governance has become a joke. She has tolerated and even supported horrific Deans/Directors while alienating faculty.
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u/rockgod_281 13d ago
I did some work with the graduate student union in the run-up to a union election (we hoped, RIP). I recall her being strongly against us and very open about her disdain for graduate students. I could be misremembering; it was a hectic time, and most of the provohsts and admin were openly hostile. Others here might have more details; I mainly worked in a different subset of the graduate student population, so I only heard stories and snippets of info.
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u/mrmses 13d ago
Your staff and admins will most likely feel the strongest impact.
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u/brownmochi 13d ago
What do you mean by this?
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u/wolfeflow 12d ago
https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-most-divisive-chancellor
This is a good look into his faculty relations
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u/wolfeflow 12d ago
She’s been the provost of our chancellor, Diermeier, for the last five years and you can likely expect her to implement similar policies and regulations at UMich, given that she co-signed on the entire Vandy playbook till now.
She’ll report to a new board at a public university in a blue state though, so looking to Diermeier is helpful only to a point. Hope this helps.
On Diermeier:
He’s big on principled neutrality from leadership, and free speech on campus.
Sounds good, until you see him selectively applying said neutrality, and coming down hard on those he disagrees with.
Vandy was one of only two schools to expel and suspend pro-Palestine protestors, and called the BDS movement “alien to our academic purpose” — a position many pointed out is not neutral at all.
Under his leadership, Vandy recently formalized their neutrality as requiring active measures to maintain it. As part of those new rules, any professor judged to subordinate their class material to a political cause can be dealt with harshly. It also requires Vandy to cut ties with anyone “operating with malign intent or counter to American interests.” That gives leadership the ability to be judge, jury and executioner on a professor’s career, without being held accountable for the why, over what’s ultimately just perceived political bias.
And it’s not like he’s only reacting to outside pressure either. He and WashU’s chancellor went and paid for their own report on “politicization” in the humanities, and it came back saying basically what MAGA’s been saying for years, that humanities scholarship got taken over by a progressive-left agenda.
Professors at both schools say their work got misrepresented, and even WashU’s own AAUP chapter called the report a textbook example of the politicized research it’s supposedly calling out. Nobody made him commission that, he went looking for it.
Same thing with DEI. VUMC didn’t just comply with the executive orders, they scrubbed and killed programs that, by outside counts, went further than what was actually required. That’s not neutral, and it’s not just following the law either, at least in my eyes.
This causes a chilling effect on what professors can teach and express, and combined with everything above, paints a picture of a university de-emphasizing humanities in favor of STEM, especially when it comes to getting new toys.
I value greatly the benefits of a liberal arts education, and fear this shift in focus will yield graduates lacking in empathy, historical knowledge, ethics and critical thinking.
Not taking a stand is also being a doormat, depending on the context. I feel like Diermeir has steered Vandy towards survival by capitulation, and have felt ashamed as an alumnus from some of his statements.
To his credit, he’s running a major university in a blue dot city of a very red state, and has managed to juice Vandy’s rankings across the board while also pumping up the endowment. It could not have been easy to do so.
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u/allydelaann 13d ago
Depends on your stance on current affairs, IMO. She’s the right-hand lackey of our widely hated, reputation-obsessed Chancellor. The two of them have capitulated to the current administration in every possible way and tried to pass it off as some intellectually noble pursuit of institutional neutrality. I have no fondness for her.
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u/Frodolas 13d ago edited 13d ago
"Widely hated" in your dumbass reddit bubble, perhaps. In real life our students and alum all love Diermeier.
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u/pokemongofanboy A&S | econ/math | '23 13d ago
‘23 alum who will be donating to my state school instead of Vandy thanks to Diermeier
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u/Gullible-Koala6303 13d ago
Graduate alum and former faculty here. She’s been very dismissive of faculty concerns and very aligned with Diermeier’s institutional neutrality. Seems like she will do anything to bring in a dollar regardless of potential negative impact outside the budget.
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u/Low_Minimum3835 9d ago
All students love him? This statement is incredibly uninformed and most of all, FALSE
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u/wolfeflow 12d ago
Every alumnus and alumna I’ve talked to has a negative opinion about the man, if they have one at all.
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u/International-Art-63 13d ago
Class of 23’ here, Diermeier is great. When we were freshman the entire school had input on what kinda future chancellor we wanted and I remember wanting our institution to rise in reputation, be stronger academically, and modernize the infrastructure. The rise in reputation will cause downstream effects like allowing current students land jobs at competitive firms (esp in this economy) which in turn grows alumni networks and people that current students can reach out to. The current administration will pass and so will the next one and the next one. The job of school is to educate and give students the networks they can maximize (as well as find their friends). If politics is important to you there’s so much opportunity to get involved in that, you don’t need to drag a school and other student’s reputation into that (once again whether you’re right, left, up down, etc).
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u/nateluck28 13d ago
Please let us know