H. Holden Thorp, whose chancellorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was upended last September by a string of controversies, will be the next provost of Washington University in St. Louis, officials there announced on Monday.
In a rare decision to step down the administrative ladder, Mr. Thorp, 48, has positioned himself as second-in-command at a private research institution that is likely to have a vacancy at the top in just a few years. Mark S. Wrighton, who is now in his 18th year as chancellor of Washington University, said he expects to resign by 2018, when a $2.2-billion capital campaign concludes.
Mr. Thorp said he was “going there to be provost.” There is “absolutely not” an agreement, he said, that he will succeed Mr. Wrighton, who is 63.
“The academic side of the university is really where my passion is,” Mr. Thorp said.
There is no denying, however, that Mr. Thorp would be a contender for the top job at Washington if he chose to seek it.
“If he likes Washington University and does well, I think he would be a candidate,” Mr. Wrighton said. “But there is no deal on the table.”
Mr. Thorp announced in September, after four years as Chapel Hill’s chancellor, that he would resign, effective June 30, 2013. He said he still intends to serve through that date, and will probably assume the provost position at Washington in August.
During his short tenure in North Carolina, Mr. Thorp faced a host of challenges in athletics. This past March the NCAA placed Chapel Hill on probation for three years, finding that members of its football team had committed academic fraud and accepted improper benefits. In a report released this month, a North Carolina Board of Governors panel reaffirmed previous findings that Chapel Hill’s African and Afro-American studies department had offered bogus classes and changed grades without authorization.
In the week before Mr. Thorp announced his resignation, a scandal broke over questionable travel expenses incurred by the university’s chief fund raiser and another development employee with whom he was romantically involved. The development employee was the mother of a former star basketball player at Chapel Hill.
Despite those controversies, Mr. Thorp retained support from faculty members, students, alumni, and the campus’s governing board, all of whom pleaded with him to reconsider his resignation.
‘A Break From All of That’
As provost at Washington, Mr. Thorp will continue to have some sports-related responsibilities because the athletic director is within the provost’s reporting chain. But Washington’s Division III program does not share the national prominence or fanatical fan base of Chapel Hill, a Division I institution with a storied men’s basketball team.
“I’m excited about taking a break from all of that,” Mr. Thorp said of big-time college athletics. “But I’m also excited about being part of Division III at Washington University.”
When Mr. Thorp was hired at Chapel Hill, in 2008, some executive-search consultants questioned whether he was too green. Mr. Thorp, then 43, was an award-winning chemist and dean of Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences. But he was 17 years younger than the average college president, and he had never been a provost, which is the most common path to the top job.
“What happened at North Carolina was a series of events that more or less were beyond my control,” Mr. Thorp said. “We’ve done a good job of dealing with them as forthrightly as we could. Whether more preparation would have helped me deal with those or not is not a question we can answer directly. But I think no matter how experienced the chancellor would have been, it would have been an enormous challenge.”
Mr. Wrighton said there was nothing in Mr. Thorp’s record as chancellor that gave him pause.
Mr. Thorp will succeed Edward S. Macias, who has served 25 years as provost, predating Mr. Wrighton’s tenure.
With his move to Washington, Mr. Thorp joins a list of well-credentialed flagship presidents who have left public higher education in recent years. In 2011, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin left the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she had led a failed effort to separate the flagship from the state system, for Amherst College. Richard W. Lariviere, who made a similar push for autonomy at the University of Oregon, was fired in 2011 and now heads Chicago’s Field Museum.
“It is a challenging environment,” Mr. Thorp said of public higher education, “but it’s one people are called to. I don’t share the concern that there won’t be people who want to do these jobs. They will.”
‘Off the Treadmill’
It is uncommon, but not unprecedented, for a chancellor or president to become a provost. Thomas G. Burish, provost of the University of Notre Dame, was previously president of Washington and Lee University.
Elizabeth Hoffman, a former president of the University of Colorado system who resigned amid controversies involving athletics and academic freedom, was provost at Iowa State University until last July. Ms. Hoffman was a finalist last year for the presidency of the University of New Mexico, but the job went to Robert G. Frank, a former provost at Kent State University.
Martha D. Saunders, a former president of the University of Southern Mississippi, became provost of the University of West Florida in January. Ms. Saunders resigned shortly after an internal audit revealed a $1-million shortfall in Southern Mississippi’s athletics department.
Dennis M. Barden, senior vice president at Witt/Kieffer, an executive-search firm, said he expected to see more presidents decide that they would prefer to be provosts. As lobbying and fund raising become more central to the presidency, he said, it is not surprising to find some college leaders who would prefer a position more squarely focused on the academic enterprise.
“I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts this is not the last one of these we are going to see,” Mr. Barden said. “At some point you want to do the things you enjoy. At some point you get off the treadmill and say, ‘Screw it, I’d like to come to work every day and like what I do.’”
If Mr. Thorp was looking for another presidency, however, he needn’t have taken this interim step, Mr. Barden said. There are plenty of search consultants who had him on their short lists.
“I can only tell you,” Mr. Barden said, “he’d be getting calls from me.”
