I have served as dean under four provosts at two institutions. After one of them stepped down, the university’s president called together the deans to ask, “What should we look for in a new provost?” I responded with what I hoped would be a clarifying question: “Are we looking for a leader or a manager?”
Deans in that meeting came down on different ends of the management-versus-leadership spectrum. Some advocated recruiting an inspirational leader who could chart a bold course and shape the university’s complicated academic enterprise. Others wanted to hire a technocrat — a manager who would distribute funding fairly to the deans, who would be responsible for leadership in concert with the president’s vision of a “new American university.” I preferred the latter: “We already have a very powerful leader at the institution,” I said. “It might make sense for the provost to be a manager — someone who can help the president carry out the vision.”
In the event, the president chose a career bureaucrat. You can read some of my previous columns to see out how well that worked out for me and my career as a dean at Arizona State. But some eight years later, as I prepare to take office as provost of the University of Tulsa in July, I continue to think about the relationship between management and leadership.
When I framed my question about managing versus leading in that long-ago meeting, I was probably too fixated on the “versus” aspect. It’s obvious to me now that “versus” should be replaced by “and.” Campuses need — at different times and in different ways — both leadership and management from their provost, whether their president is a visionary, a micromanager, a fund raiser, an entrepreneur, or a scholar.
So far in The Provost Files, I’ve chronicled my decision to return to administration and how I’m preparing for my first provostship. Now I turn to the question of administrative style. The trick for chief academic officers seems to be to manage effectively (always) and to choose the right times and places to exercise leadership — knowing full well that, sometimes, the president may exert leadership that will trump the provost’s.
These aren’t abstract considerations based on an ideal of excellence for all provosts, at all times and in all places. Certainly the role is different from campus to campus. Yet the provost’s position at Arizona State, for example, does have some similarities with my new role as provost at Tulsa. At both institutions, the provost must:
- Work to ensure that academic processes — including hiring, tenure, and promotion — serve the institution in the areas of both excellence and fairness.
- Oversee the deans, and help lead their work in shaping both disciplinary and interdisciplinary curricula within the units and in the campus’s programs for general education.
- Manage a complex budget and work with other vice presidents to ensure that the campus attracts and supports the right number of students that its physical and academic infrastructures can accommodate.
The size of the institution does make a difference, however, in the nature of the provost’s role. And I’ve been thinking through the effects of scale as I prepare to move from a $3-billion enterprise to a smaller-scale university with an annual budget in the hundreds of millions.
Growing up, I had access to an unusually large number of books. My parents loved literature, which became my own passion, but were also deeply concerned with public affairs. One of the books that grabbed my attention was a mass-market paperback edition of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. I vividly remember the cover: a ’70s collage of images, featuring Mahatma Gandhi at the center. I don’t have a vivid memory of the specifics of Schumacher’s argument. What I do recall, and have carried with me, is the notion that our decisions about a group, a company, or a community should respect what is particular, rather than what is “standard,” to the scale of that entity.
In my teaching, research, and writing, I’ve always wanted to have a broad national or even global impact, but I’ve also thrived as a committed member of small academic groups — the departments in which I was trained, hired, and tenured; the scholarly societies in which I shared ideas (and drinks). I’ve always thought “small is beautiful,” even though I’ve spent much of my career at a vast institution.
When I took the job at Arizona State, I was dazzled by the president’s vision of an institution defined by whom it includes, rather than whom it excludes. I believed it was possible to marry an institution of perpetual growth to human-scale impact. I don’t want to say I was naïve or foolish, but my years of working as a dean and as a professor at Arizona State have made me a bit more suspicious of the possibility of bringing together true individual attention and a huge institutional scale. I’m relieved to be heading to a small research university that — even with projected growth — won’t directly serve many more than 5,000 students.
The scale of my new campus home has shaped how I anticipate managing, and leading, its academic efforts.
For example, there is no way that a provost at a university as large as Arizona State can come to know all of its faculty members. And the students could be little more than a blur, except for a few who might get to meet the provost through extraordinary achievement or sheer luck.
At Tulsa, I expect to get to know every faculty member on the campus. I see that not merely as a good work habit for any new leader or manager, but as an attractive requirement of the job. A provost is more like a mayor than a chief executive, and the prospect of being a “small-town mayor” is highly appealing. I want to know my town’s citizens, and I see that as important to making their lives better.
At the same time, I’ve been told repeatedly that a key thing the university wants me to accomplish as provost is to lead an effort to create explicit and fair policies. To what extent should a university’s policies and processes reflect local conditions? To what extent do a cosmopolitan professoriate and an international student body deserve policies that are — well — pretty much just like everyone else’s? It could be argued, after all, that the realm of policy shouldn’t differ according to geography or institutional scale.
I have a lot to learn about the University of Tulsa itself, its faculty and staff members, and its students. I have probably even more to learn about the city of Tulsa and the region of northeastern Oklahoma. “Management” as provost means that I carry out the business of the office to ensure academic excellence. But exercising “leadership” will be an art: bringing my decades of knowledge and experience as a scholar, teacher, and administrator to lead the faculty — yet not to dictate.
I don’t have a predetermined outcome in mind. Instead I hope I can bring people together and form a creative community that is responsive to circumstances inside and outside academe. The university should be fine-tuned to prepare students to excel in their personal, professional, and social lives even as we support an intellectual community that brings to the campus knowledge and ideas from all times and all places, and contributes knowledge to the world through research.
And while we at the University of Tulsa look to peers such as Rice University and Washington University in St. Louis as models of what small, private research institutions can accomplish, we should no more imitate them than Arizona State.
So much for the theory. My next column will report on my first few weeks in office, as I get settled, learn how things work in my new institutional home, and begin to make decisions that will inevitably lead some to conclude I was a terrible hire, while others shrug and mutter that all provosts are the same, so what did they expect.
