ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 16, 1997 TAG: 9704160039
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
Gordon Davies, 20-year director of the State Council of Higher Education, is a respected, nonpartisan, high-performance professional. So why is he losing his job?
THE GORDON Davies story is only secondarily about Gordon Davies. It is, first, about higher education and its future in Virginia.
Davies, director for the past 20 years of the State Council of Higher Education, was given notice Tuesday that he won't be much longer. Council members voted 7-3 not to renew his contract, which runs out June 30.
Worry not for Davies, 58. Highly respected in academic and government circles throughout the country, he'll do all right.
Worry, rather, for what this could portend for Virginia's colleges and universities. They may not do so well.
The framework by which higher education is governed in Virginia - the council is a coordinating agency, but a powerful one, for a diverse group of semi-autonomous institutions - can make the director's job peculiarly difficult. Davies did it admirably.
Still, the problem is not that Davies is indispensable. Nobody is.
The problem is that council members are ousting Davies for all the wrong reasons.
Was the council's work poorly done, its professional staff poorly managed? Hardly. In a 1994 review, Davies and his staff were given high marks by the watchdog Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, an agency not given to handing out accolades. The quality of the staff Davies developed is suggested by the fact that one associate director recently resigned to become president of the American Association of Higher Education.
Has Davies been resistant to change? To the contrary. He has been an agent of change, pushing and prodding Virginia's sometimes reluctant colleges and universities to restructure, to do more with less, to adjust to the demands of a new era.
Was he impossible to work with? Not according to legislators and - until George Allen - governors and council members of both parties with whom he has maintained good relations. Not according to college administrators who, while they may sometimes have chafed under council restrictions, came to respect Davies for his integrity and intelligence.
What, then, was the problem? Lack of chemistry, council members said, whatever that means. More likely, judging from recent history, it was:
Gov. Allen's making of second-rate, party-loyalty appointments to a council that before had included some of Virginia's top corporate and educational leaders.
Davies' insistence that higher-education opportunities should be expanded, not restricted - and that, no matter how efficient and streamlined Virginia's colleges and universities can get, plummeting state financial support for them does not bode well for their future.
Davies' refusal to go along with the notion that higher education is simply one more arena of state government to be given over to partisan politicizing.
The ironic result of dumping Davies, however, is that the opposition Democrats have just been handed an issue for this year's gubernatorial campaign. The hard part, whoever wins, will be putting Virginia higher education back on the nonpolitical track where it belongs.
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