Former Penn Provost Stanley Chodorow is likely to soon find himself out of a job, as officials at the California Virtual University -- an Internet-based venture Chodorow has headed since September -- decided Wednesday to dissolve the foundation that has been running the university. Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, chairperson of the board of directors of the CVU Foundation and a vice provost in the University of California system, said yesterday that the board decided it will be "dismantling the foundation" in the near future. CVU was designed as a collaborative effort by nearly 100 California colleges and universities aiming to provide on-line and other forms of distance-learning education. Chodorow was away from his home yesterday and could not be reached for comment. He declined to discuss the situation earlier this week. By dismantling the foundation, Tomlinson-Keasey said, the 56-year-old Chodorow will "not really" be continuing to run CVU. "He has done an outstanding job for us," she said, but added that CVU's current organizational structure has proved unworkable. Chodorow, who was provost at Penn from 1994 to 1997, spent much of his final year in office trying to win a position as the president of a university, reaching finalist status at five schools before resigning as provost in October of that year when he was announced as a finalist for the presidency at the University of Texas at Austin. But Chodorow lost his presidential bid six weeks after announcing his resignation and then taught medieval studies for a semester in Penn's History Department. He accepted the offer to head the virtual university last summer, heading back to San Diego, his home before coming to Penn nearly five years ago. Chodorow's future role with the CVU program, if any, is "not worked out yet," Tomlinson-Keasey said. "We will have a transition period" to arrange the new management of the school's World Wide Web site, she said, so Chodorow will not have his duties eliminated immediately. The University of California will be responsible for general maintenance of the CVU Web site. CVU is made up of the University of California, California State University, California's community colleges and the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. Rumors were recently reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education that CVU was on the brink of closure. In an e-mail to co-workers, Chodorow said CVU would "cease operations on March 31," the Chronicle reported. "We just did not have enough fuel to get up to takeoff speed," he wrote. However, Tomlinson-Keasey said CVU "absolutely" has a good future ahead of it, noting that technology is being used to "augment higher education in a variety of ways." "It will certainly continue," she said of the on-line university. Users of the CVU Web site will not notice any differences, she said. The changes will be purely administrative.
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