Ms. Sullivan's signature effort over the last year was a reinvention of Virginia's budgeting model, which she hoped would give deans more authority and accountability.
Known as responsibility center management, the model is based on the premise that individual academic units should keep the revenues they generate. Versions of the model are employed by a number of elite institutions, including Harvard University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Ms. Sullivan was provost before she came to Virginia.
Ms. Sullivan's faculty supporters say her two-year tenure did not allow enough time to test the model, which is designed to promote creativity and entrepreneurship among departments that will benefit directly from money-making programs.
But the transition to the new model, which turns on its head a longstanding system that vested great power in the hands of a single chief operating officer, has created significant tensions between Ms. Sullivan's two lieutenants, two administrators familiar with the inner workings of her cabinet said.
To great fanfare last year, Ms. Sullivan recruited the Johns Hopkins University's chief operating officer and a Duke University vice provost to take similar positions at Virginia. But Michael Strine, executive vice president and chief operating officer, and John D. Simon, executive vice president and provost, are locked in a tense and continuing power struggle over who has the authority to steer university resources, said the administrative sources, who were given anonymity to describe internal matters.
The source of the tension between the two men "is as complicated as the story between Terry and the board," one of the administrators said. Before Mr. Simon and Mr. Strine were hired, major resource-allocation decisions were centralized in the person of Leonard W. Sandridge, a Virginia veteran of four decades, who earned "Wizard of Oz" status as executive vice president and chief operating officer, the source said. Transitioning to a model where the provost theoretically has far greater discretion over resource allocation has not been easy, and both men Ms. Sullivan hired are advocating for more power in those discussions, the sources said.
Both sources also cited conversations with other administrators who reported that Mr. Strine took his complaints about the Sullivan administration directly to members of the Board of Visitors. Neither source, however, had direct knowledge of the conversations or the details of the concerns Mr. Strine may have expressed.
