UVA Admin Has Lost Control of the Med School Abuses Narrative
The controversy over an allegedly toxic work environment at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and UVA Health System reached escape velocity last week.
On Thursday, President Jim Ryan and the Board of Visitors hired an outside law firm to conduct an “independent review” of allegations made in a letter signed by 128 medical school faculty and others, a tacit admission that the charges are serious.
Dr. Stephen Culp, an associate professor in the medical school
The next day, Dr. Stephen Culp, an associate professor in the medical school, told the UVA Faculty Senate that he rejected as “categorically false” assertions made by Ryan in a previous communication to the medical staff. The Faculty Senate unanimously passed a motion to show support for their colleagues in the School of Medicine, reports the The Daily Progress.
It is unknown from The Daily Progress article whether Culp is one of the 128 signatories to the faculty letter, but he is clearly sympathetic to them. By going public with his concerns, he undercut Ryan’s claim that the accusers were anonymous. Culp, a urology oncologist who was inspired to enter the field after his father died of metastatic kidney cancer, is well known to the UVA medical community. He was profiled in a short UVA video profile about five years ago, and he now serves as a medical school representative in the Faculty Senate.
The initial letter released on September 5 by the physicians accused Health Systems CEO Kent Craig and School of Medicine Dean Melina Kibbe of compromising patient safety, spending excessively on c-suite overhead, and creating a culture of fear and retaliation, among other abuses. The charges lacked specifics, and the published version of the letter did not include the signatories’ names. The letter writers said they would reveal their identities only to four specific members of the Board of Visitors whom they trusted.
In a letter to medical school employees a couple of days later, Ryan downplayed the allegations, noting that they “besmirched” the reputations of Kent and Kibbe and that every medical institution has its disgruntled employees. “Even though it is difficult to investigate generalized and anonymous claims of wrongdoing, without specific details or names to follow up with,” he had said, “we will do our best to investigate.”
That letter triggered a follow-up response from the group, which listed numerous meetings in which med school physicians and faculty had presented detailed complaints to Kent, Kibbe, Ryan, Provost Ian Baucom and others over the previous year.
If the Board of Visitors discussed the allegations at its meeting of September 12 and 13, it did not do so in open session. It is possible that the Board broached the topic in closed session, citing exemptions to Virginia’s open meetings law for legal or personnel matters. If that was the case, however, the Board did not vote on any formal action when it reconvened in open session.
The announcement that UVA was hiring a law firm yielded little new insight into the controversy, the details of which remain hidden from public view. As reported by CBS19 News, this was the full statement:
The University Board of Visitors and President Ryan have agreed to retain outside counsel to conduct an independent review of the complaints and allegations raised by members of the UVA Medical School faculty in their letter dated Sept. 7, 2024. University leaders, including Executive Vice President for Health Affairs Craig Kent and Medical School Dean Melina Kibbe, agree on the need to pursue a thorough and independent review. The Board and President Ryan will receive the findings of this review and work with UVA Health leaders to address any issues that may arise through this process.
Culp’s statements to the Faculty Senate, however, did provide new details. Reports The Daily Progress:
According to Culp, university administrators have been well aware of the allegations in the letter sent to the school’s governing Board of Visitors on Sept. 5 for the “better part of the year, if not more” — and not the few months Ryan has claimed. Culp also said administrators were handed the names of multiple complicit employees, not just UVa Health CEO Dr. Craig Kent and School of Medicine Dean Melina Kibbe — both of whom the letter’s signatories have called on to resign.
“I can stand here before you honestly and claim these statements to be categorically false,” Culp said of Ryan’s statement while addressing the Faculty Senate in a hall at the university’s Darden School of Business. “I can say I know firsthand that documentation and names were provided to university leadership for them to investigate as I was involved in providing some of this documentation and names. These were not generalized anonymous claims.”
Dissident faculty members specifically called out One Team | United on Access, an ambulatory care initiative.
That initiative was rolled out in July 2022 and was promoted by UVa Health as a way to restructure patient access, standardize various processes and “optimize workflow.” The reality was quite different, according to Culp, who said it “infringed upon our ability to do research activities at time for academic medicine and to mentor junior faculty and students and residents.”
So, he and other faculty members in the School of Medicine, took their concerns along with a draft Faculty Senate resolution to UVa Provost Ian Baucom on Jan. 9. Culp recalled specifically asking the provost whether they should bring the resolution to their fellow senators.
“Do not involve the Senate,” he said they were told by Baucom. “It will be taken care of.”
A couple of months later, on March 5, a working meeting was held with more than 200 faculty members in the School of Medicine, who again claimed the health system had become a toxic work environment under the direction of Kent and Kibbe. While Culp described the conversation as “productive” at the time, he said it was not long after that reports of “retaliatory behavior directed towards School of Medicine faculty members, including multiple School of Medicine faculty senators” began to increase.
The Daily Progress talked to sources who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation. They said that faculty and physicians have had salaries and bonuses cut and had concern cards and records of insubordination in their personnel files.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
