It's admittedly long been common for particularly large donors to be flattered a bit with some role, but over the past 10-20 years this seems to have gone from being a few members of the board, to being almost all of them, with very few members appointed primarily because of non-donation-related merit, like someone thinking they're actually good candidates for overseeing an academic/research institution. Note the lack of accomplished scientists on the board, for example. In addition, the political appointees seem to have decreased in quality: it was once more common to appoint someone who, while they were from your own party, was a late-career "elder statesman" type figure, e.g. a former governor or Congressman.

It's sadly not a partisan issue, either: if you look at, say, the University of California Board of Regents, you have a nice bipartisan mixture of big Democratic donors (appointed by Democratic governors) and big Republican donors (appointed by Republican governors). Their expertise is... not too relevant seeming, including such credentials as "former CEO of Paramount Pictures" and "husband of Dianne Feinstein".

The main objection that I and most people I've talked to have is that the BOV hasn't given a good reason for its actions. It may very well be that Sullivan deserved to be fired. It may very well be that there needed to be more drastic changes than she was willing to make (although for an appropriate idea of how hard drastic, top down change is at a top University, see my description of faculty consensus above). But without releasing any concrete reason, backed up by publicly available data, and by essentially saying "shut up and trust our judgment", they showed a fundamental disconnect between their idea of acceptable governance and the rest of the university's idea of acceptable governance. For the record, I think that if you look at them as the board of a corporation replacing a CEO, their actions are totally reasonable (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was, in part, how they viewed themselves; this doesn't really say much for their case, though, because that still shows a massive cultural disconnect between them and the university body).

This is huge. This will cause a loss of confidence in UVA if they don't take effective action to recover.

   It was later revealed this was the result of a coup by a
   bunch of Darden MBA's because they wanted "radical" change
   to the future plans of the University, not incremental
   change.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...

The fundamental problem, I think, is the Board of Visitors model for running public universities. We had serious problems with this back in 2003 at Virginia Tech (http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/1171/board-of-visitor...).

"The university has a troubling history when it comes to matter race..."

"UVa's racial problem is larger than simply a few isolated incidents of bigotry. ... There is still a discernable "Good Ol' Boy" network that heavily influences the Commonwealth's social, economic and political life and holds UVA up as a crown jewel."

What I posted was not just my opinions, and it was not uninformed. Nevertheless I deleted it because the contents or way it was expressed clearly offended a lot of people here.

Just because a theory is possible does not mean it happened. As I stated before, I have heard no one, on any side, allege discrimination.

"Old Boy" network indeed. The discrimination is not her gender but her provenance (which is that, not being a Darden alum, she is not under the control of the Darden alum pecking order)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...