During my first weeks on the job as provost of the University of Tulsa, I’ve heard the same word dozens of times. Sometimes it’s part of a full phrase: “You must feel like you’re drinking from a firehose!” Other times it’s just a sympathetic glance and the lone word: “firehose.”
Luckily, I’m feeling more energized than deluged. Part of that is my temperament — I love learning about academic structures and their idiosyncratic complexities. But there are a few other factors at work as well that have made for a good start, and might be worth keeping in mind if you, too, are new to a leadership post, or are about to be.
Some of my advice about this transition period might seem contradictory but that’s the nature of the beast:
- You need to show that you are listening and learning — but also project your experience and understanding of your new position and institution.
- You need to demonstrate that you’re part of your new team — but also stand out and make your mark quickly.
- You need to plan for all of this — but also be your authentic self.
In what follows, I provide a few lessons learned not only from my first few weeks, but from the time leading up to them.
Learning the ropes is easier with a little prep. I had a long “on-ramp” to the job — as I described in an earlier essay in The Provost Files series — and thus plenty of time to master at least some of my new university’s internal policies and definitions before I set foot on the campus. So these first weeks have been about connecting the dots. It helps that I have a brilliant vice provost with whom it is a joy to work and that the other members of the president’s leadership team have welcomed my external voice on the academic side of the enterprise.
The role of any vice president on a college campus is dual: (1) Work with the president to shape and carry out a coherent vision, and (2) exercise both management and leadership over a particular chunk of the institution. The provost’s position at Tulsa, as at many institutions, carries an additional title. Here it’s “executive vice president for academic affairs.” The “executive” lingo indicates the special role that the provost — and academic affairs — plays at any university.
My focus has to be on supporting faculty members, who lie at the heart of academic affairs and who are, by nature, an independent bunch. It is a very different role from that of other vice presidents who manage institutional offices with a hierarchical organizational structure more akin to the business world.
As I’ve gotten to know faculty members here, one issue has stood out in relief: In the past few years, professors have felt — as a Faculty Senate leader put it to me — treated as if they are “employees” rather than “talent.” Tulsa’s president, Brad Carson, does not come from a typical academic background, although he has inspired the faculty with the belief that he truly values, and is interested in, the academic work of research as well as teaching. He has put together a leadership team of people with extraordinary professional backgrounds, but, in many cases, not a great deal of experience in academic organizations. And although I worked with many aspects of universities when I was a dean, I’ve never had to learn as much about business, HR, or even sports, as I’ll be taking on in my new role.
So I’m being educated about the institution in these early weeks, but I’m doing some educating of my own, too. Already I discovered that diverse backgrounds on the leadership team may mean we don’t always speak the same language. For example, while working with the president’s chief of staff, who came to the university after a long career in business, we quickly realized we weren’t understanding each other: Her spreadsheets work on a “FY” (fiscal year) basis, whereas I think in terms of “AY” (academic year). She was easily able to add an AY column to the spreadsheets so that I could see quickly that FY 2024 encompasses, in my language, AY 2023-24.
It’s never too soon to start contributing. A good example of that is a misunderstanding we were able to quickly resolve about our faculty contracts. The academic year, typically seen as running for nine months from August 15 to May 15, is really a fiction, given that faculty members work on research and teaching throughout the year, and certainly work on teaching-related prep well before classes start in August and after they end in May. While their benefits cover the full 12 months of the fiscal year, faculty members can elect to receive their pay either for the nine months of the academic year, or pro-rated over 12 months (most choose the latter option). At Tulsa, however, the nine-month pay option was typically paid over 10 months (why that was the case, I am still unsure).
All of which led, in recent years, to a misunderstanding: People in the HR office thought faculty members had “10-month contracts.”
Faculty Senate leaders, deans, and I saw that this could create problems with grants and contracts that pay faculty members for three summer months of full-time work. If HR thought they were paid by the university for 10 months of work, and the federal government believed that they were exclusively working on funded grants for three months, those numbers wouldn’t add up. Working with the new HR leader, we fixed the problem, and now faculty members will be paid their academic-year salaries either over nine or 12 months.
Eliminating the 10-month pay cycle will restore clarity and help us avoid potential compliance issues. The solution required all of us to understand each other, and to work together on technical issues and communications.
Socializing matters. I knew I had finally earned at least a little trust from the faculty when I was invited to a regular after-hours gathering at a local restaurant. There were colleagues from across the university chatting about work and life. At one point, I was introduced to the campus head of security, who had come to the gathering with an old friend from their past lives as natives of New Jersey. We started talking football. I’ve been a Philadelphia Eagles fan since birth, while our campus head of security, it turns out, is a longtime fan of the New York Giants. (The Eagles and Giants have been hated rivals for decades.) We reminisced about watching the NFL growing up in the 1970s, and I decided to troll them (as I do with all New York fans): “I’m sure you remember the ‘Miracle at the Meadowlands.’” Groans ensued. The hero of that game for the Eagles, Herman Edwards, is now head football coach at Arizona State, where I served as dean and was a faculty member until three months ago. It was all in good fun but before leaving the gathering, I couldn’t resist indulging in the “E-A-G-L-E-S” chant that Philadelphia fans deploy at all home games.
President Carson holds a short, thrice-weekly meeting of his leadership team to coordinate efforts and solve problems. He goes around the room asking people for updates. The next day the president began with the athletic director: “Well, we’ve had to manage a pretty serious situation this week. Our provost” — and here I turned around to stare at him — “has been getting into fights at bars over the Eagles and the Giants.” I embarrassedly tried to explain while everyone in the room laughed.
Not a problem to solve (I hope) but an indication that my first few weeks on the campus have gone well. To ensure that your first weeks as provost (or other institutional leader) go well, try to do these things:
- Ask people what they prefer to be called. (I noticed a distinction between what people called one colleague and how that leader signed emails, so I asked and learned that this leader preferred a full name to a nickname.)
- Ask for meetings, and go visit people on their turf. You’ll see their space and understand better what they do when they’re showing you their office rather than coming to yours.
- Show up to the office early, leave late. Ask your family to accommodate your ridiculous hours in these first months.
- Make your boss proud. Don’t be a sycophant, but also don’t contradict your boss. Your arrival will change group dynamics. Make sure the change strengthens the team, even if that means being quiet when you want to say something or speaking up when you’d prefer not to.
In my forthcoming columns I will dig into particular areas of the provost’s responsibilities. I’m going to begin with a set of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten about the job from fellow provosts, some experienced and some new to the position like me.
