Checks and Balances at Work: The Restructuring of Virginia’s Public Higher Education System

How one state and its institutions realigned their efforts in order to pull together? Lara Couturier explains this issue in this report. She relates in detail how an almost routine conflict in 2002 over who should set tuition in the Commonwealth of Virginia stimulated a statewide discussion of institutional management and accountability in the broad context of public purposes and priorities, and how that discussion yielded an almost unprecedented broad legislative “reconstruction” of Virginia’s Public Higher Education System in 2005.