The Path to Change Runs Through the Provost’s Office

When José L. Cruz became a provost three years ago, he knew a lot had to change. And that the change had to start with him.

A self-described introvert more at home with a spreadsheet full of numbers than a room full of people, Mr. Cruz recognized that his new role, at California State University’s Fullerton campus, required him to get out from behind his computer screen.

If a campus is going to pursue new priorities, fix systemic problems, or adopt innovation on a broad scale, a provost will most likely be directing the charge. To do that, the provost has to listen, inform, discuss, and persuade, engaging people from all corners of campus.

One of Mr. Cruz’s first moves in his new job was to get rid of his desk. He set up his office more like a living room, with armchairs and a coffee table, perfect for welcoming the daily parade of deans, administrators, and professors.

Chief academic officers have always played a key role in running the day-to-day affairs of their campuses, but that role has grown even more prominent as presidents spend more time away from campus, tending to fund raising and other external duties that make up growing portions of their jobs.

While colleges still depend on their presidents to set big-picture vision and make decisions about direction, they increasingly rely on chief academic officers to shepherd improvement and innovation and get institutionwide support for change. Provosts’ roles are expanding to involve more strategic thinking, particularly as pressures grow for colleges to prove their worth and rein in costs. Mr. Cruz, like many of his peers, not only oversees Fullerton’s faculty and academic affairs, he also plays an important role in planning, budgeting, and improving student outcomes.

Provosts’ influence is reflected in the resources they manage. At Fullerton, about 60 percent of the institution’s budget falls under academic affairs, a figure that is in line with many other institutions.

“A lot of the issues that could impact a president’s ability to meet his or her ambitions or goals,” Mr. Cruz says, “are dependent on the provost’s ability to deliver.”

Provosts became a more common part of academic life in the decades after World War II. Booming enrollments and expanding institutions hastened the appointment of chief academic officers to oversee the bigger faculties and increased numbers of schools and programs. The provost was meant to be a dean for the other deans, the academic realm’s “first among equals.” At first, provosts were most often found at elite institutions, but the position is now common at all types of colleges.

Some colleges that have done without provosts for years are now adding them. Villanova University announced this spring that the dean of its business school, Patrick G. Maggitti, would become its first provost. The university had a vice president for academic affairs, but not all academic units were under the office; the law school, for example, reported directly to the president.

Villanova needed a provost, Mr. Maggitti says, to help build up its graduate-education programs and faculty research culture — part of a larger goal of enhancing the university’s national reputation. “There became a clear need to pull together all the academic enterprises under one umbrella, to look for opportunities to increase efficiencies, but also to be more effective in delivering academic initiatives.”

Provosts have traditionally come from the faculty, rising through their departments to administrative roles such as dean before landing the job. While credibility with the faculty remains an important qualification, the traditional pathway to the top academic job on campus doesn’t provide much preparation for running an entire university, says Peter Lange, a professor of political science at Duke University who served as provost there for 15 years.

“I used to say that as a professor, all of your rewards come from knowing one subject really deeply, and as a provost, all of your rewards come from seeming to know a lot about a very wide range of subjects,” Mr. Lange says. “That breadth is a challenge in the beginning.”

Search committees are attracted by provost candidates who have broad managerial experience, says Michael A. Baer, a former provost at Northeastern University and now a vice president at Isaacson, Miller, an executive-search firm. Colleges still want candidates with a deep understanding of curriculum and faculty expectations, he says, but they may want to see if a candidate has wider operational experience, too. Has he or she worked on a building project or a master plan? Has he or she worked with units of the campus, such as student affairs, that may once have been seen as peripheral to the academic mission?

Some new provosts provide examples of those who have come to the job with that broader background. Mr. Maggitti, who holds a Ph.D. in strategic management, spent more than a dozen years in the steel and mining industries before joining the business faculty at Villanova. Mr. Cruz rose through the electrical-engineering faculty and administrative ranks at his alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, but he also spent three years as vice president of higher-education policy and practice at the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that promotes student success.

At its core, the provost’s job has always been demanding, says Mark G. McNamee, who just stepped down as provost at Virginia Tech after 14 years. But the context has changed, he says. State support for public colleges has diminished, competition for students has increased, and the regulatory environment has grown more complex.

Now, Mr. McNamee says, “all the pieces are harder to manage.”

Provosts’ offices have added staff to handle extra workload and also to focus on strategic priorities. Mr. McNamee estimates that his office’s staff grew by 10 percent while he was at Virginia Tech. At Fullerton, Mr. Cruz hired a deputy provost to help with operational areas such as institutional research and enrollment services. Duke University, meanwhile, added part-time vice provosts for the arts and for global strategies and programs to advance its institutional goals in those areas.

The growth in the provost’s office has contributed to the expansion of administrative ranks on many campuses, a trend that some faculty members and others denounce as “administrative bloat,” which they worry diverts money from the core academic enterprise. But Mr. McNamee says provosts need more staff to accomplish the work critical to preserving the university’s academic quality and moving the institution forward. “We’re conscious of having as lean an organization as we can,” he says, “but if you’re too lean, you can’t get things done.”

The task of shaping change and making it happen across a campus falls to provosts partly because they have institutionwide reach. They can gather information and opinions from all of a university’s colleges and divisions. They can evaluate possible courses of action relatively free from the parochial concerns of deans, department chairs, and others who lead academic units.

Provosts have the purview to steer resources, setting clear budget priorities. And they can seed change throughout an institution by talking it up, following up with the various deans and department chairs, and sharing promising results.

“The provost needs to be an exceptionally good facilitator,” says Lauren Bowen, provost at Juniata College, in Pennsylvania. “The ideas might get generated from the faculty or from advancement, but it’s up to the provost to facilitate the process so that voices are heard and decisions get made.”

There are some kinds of change that only a provost can make happen, says Harold Hellenbrand, who returned to teaching this summer after 11 years as provost and vice president for academic affairs at California State University at Northridge.

Mr. Hellenbrand says part of his job in recent years had been to serve as point person for Northridge’s efforts to align its technical-education programs with the needs of the region’s aerospace manufacturers. An English professor by training, he says, “If you’d told me I was going to be doing that 20 years ago, I would have told you you were nuts.”

Mr. Hellenbrand oversaw the collection and analysis of data for the project, evaluated which programs and technologies might be needed, and asked questions about what the university was trying to do, why, and how.

“A technologist can provide the technology, the data people can do data, and people can ask questions,” Mr. Hellenbrand says. But when it comes to tying all those things together — “so you actually get bang for the buck,” he says — you need the provost.

Getting that bang also requires building support for change among fellow administrators and faculty members. Through his research on aerospace manufacturing, Mr. Hellenbrand found that the local job market was no longer dominated by huge defense contractors but filled with smaller manufacturers that needed employees with more adaptable skills. “You’re no longer preparing people for a job that’s going to be there for 20 years, you’re preparing people for developing skills in industries that will cross-migrate over time,” he says.

Getting the university to adapt its programs to produce graduates with the right training meant persuading faculty members that the market had fundamentally changed and that longstanding programs needed to change, too. Some professors are never going to agree that revising academic programs to respond to industry needs is a good idea, he says. But Mr. Hellenbrand worked to get other faculty members behind his efforts, including by creating incentives to develop new courses, such as matching-grant funds. He also provided money and training to support a blend of traditional engineering curricula with team-based project learning designed with the local job market in mind.

While currying broad support among faculty is important, provosts must sometimes proceed without it, says Peter N. Stearns, a former provost at George Mason University.

About a decade ago, when the university was expanding programs, Mr. Stearns wanted to create an interdisciplinary major in global affairs. Such a major, he believed, could build on existing strengths and attract new students. But the provost says he encountered some resistance from members of a few departments who, Mr. Stearns says, worried that the program might infringe on their turf. “I won’t claim that I persuaded everybody,” he says, “but I persuaded enough people that we were able to go forward with it.”

Gaining support for change and innovation requires much discussion, and many, many meetings. Ask a provost what he or she does on a typical day, and out will spill a litany of back-to-back appointments: with the president, with the president’s cabinet, with the deans, with faculty members.

Mr. Cruz sometimes refers to his role at Fullerton as “chief discussant.” It is through his meetings, which take up at least six hours of every day and tend to be scheduled five months in advance, that he shapes and prompts change. He and his staff are already preparing for specific meetings scheduled for February.

One key issue Mr. Cruz set out to improve was Fullerton’s graduation rate, a change urged by the university’s accreditor. Only about half of the university’s first-time, full-time freshmen who entered in 2008 graduated in six years, and the university had little timely data about who was dropping out, or why.

Using data better became a topic of conversation in many of Mr. Cruz’s meetings. He talked up a new tool to deans and department chairs that culled and compiled student data from across the institution daily, and persuaded several colleges within the university to test it as a way to improve their retention rates. He oversaw the development of training programs to teach people across the campus how to use it.

Mr. Cruz also set aside money to hire a new type of academic adviser to comb through the data and find seniors who were at risk of not graduating. The advisers, known as graduation specialists, were able to help 350 people this spring avoid having to defer graduation. Fullerton’s most-recent six-year graduation rate, for freshmen who entered in the fall of 2009, is just over 60 percent, a historic high for the campus. At least four other Cal State campuses are adopting the data system Mr. Cruz advocated.

The smallest of changes can require a provost to coordinate discussions over months, and even years. At Kansas State University, administrators wanted to rethink professional titles, including adding some that would allow people who had taught off the tenure track for many years to advance beyond the title of “instructor.” April Mason, provost and senior vice president, who is also president of the Association of Chief Academic Officers, convened a campus task force to examine the issue, discussed the panel’s proposals with the deans and the president’s cabinet, went over them with the human resources and legal departments, and brought a final draft before the state Board of Regents.

With the goal of improving the university’s ability to recruit and keep teaching faculty, the task force suggested creating a new range of titles that would allow a person to advance from instructor to advanced instructor to senior instructor and offering five-year contracts to some instructors. The idea required persistence from the provost. She pursued further discussions with faculty members who expressed concerns about how the new titles and a promotion system outside the tenure track might undermine the existing system. When the final proposal reached the regents, they balked at five-year contracts and approved three-year contracts instead.

Over all, the process of developing and finalizing the new titles took about three years. When you think you’ve communicated more than necessary in a process like this, Ms. Mason says, you’re probably just getting started.

For provosts, leading innovation also means helping to generate money and putting it in the right places.

A few years ago, provosts might have been involved peripherally in fund raising or working to increase tuition revenue by attracting more international students. But post-recession economic pressures have made finances a main day-to-day concern of chief academic officers, says Mr. Hellenbrand, of Northridge.

The prominence of financial matters in the job duties of colleges’ academic chiefs can be problematic because many provosts have little or no training in budgeting, says James Martin, a professor of English at Mount Ida College and co-author of two books about the role of provosts. Often, “they’re careful stewards of institutional resources, but they’re not really imaginative or skillful,” he says. Now that colleges are unable to rely on growth, he says, the same old budget processes and priorities are likely to lead back to the same old impasses and challenges and inhibit strategic changes.

Mr. Lange, of Duke, says it is up to provosts to get their campuses to take strategic planning seriously.

With very tight budgets now, colleges have to deliberately map out what’s most important and what they want to achieve, Mr. Lange says. And provosts are the key to shaping those priorities, putting resources behind them, and getting the rest of the campus to support them. Given the financial challenges ahead for colleges, provosts’ ability to lead strategic thinking on their campuses and build broad support, Mr. Lange says, is going to be even more important in the next five years than in the past decade.

At Fullerton, Mr. Cruz is preparing the university to change how money is allocated across colleges to focus resources on the university’s highest priorities. Rather than doling out money based solely on projected enrollment, he wants to require colleges to make budget requests and tie those proposals to strategic goals, such as improving retention rates or building up programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

California is moving toward a performance-based funding model for its higher-education system, Mr. Cruz says, and “we’re looking to position ourselves for when that day comes by ensuring that our internal investments are guided to those people and programs that will position us well for whatever the metrics are.”

Proposing such changes requires provosts to have the will, and the skill, to brief colleagues on the facts and introduce potential new ways of operating. He is spending much of the next several weeks visiting each of the university’s more than 70 academic units to discuss how best to align resources with academic goals. “That’s a very difficult conversation to have, because now you’re letting the realities of your resources impact or influence the scholarly disciplines that are represented in your faculty,” Mr. Cruz says. But, given budget realities, “we need to have those conversations.”

Difficult conversations come with the provost’s job, and some of the toughest involve personnel. During her first year as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Kathleen Enz Finken found that she would have to make some changes in the ranks of the institution’s top administrators.

“Sometimes they’re great people, but they’re just not up to the job,” she says. Telling a high-profile colleague that he or she needs to move into a new role with less responsibility is one of the more stressful things provosts do, she says, but sometimes it’s the best thing for the institution.

Perhaps the biggest challenge provosts face each day is time management. With all of the meetings and day-to-day troubleshooting, it requires discipline to plan for the long term.

After five years in the provost’s role at Kansas State, Ms. Mason says that she has elbowed out three hours on one afternoon each week to prepare for meetings and focus on strategic matters. Mr. Cruz has an hour scheduled each morning and afternoon with no appointments. But last-minute meetings, and the occasional crisis, still intrude.

“We often joke,” says Mr. McNamee, “‘Do we have time to think?’”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.