Why Being a Provost Is One of the Toughest Jobs at Vulnerable Colleges

Karyn Z. Sproles had been successful in climbing the higher-ed ladder. She had gone from professor to department head to associate dean and, later, to dean. Eventually, she ascended to provost of Marietta College, in Ohio, a job that squeezed her between the aspirations of the faculty and the stark financial limitations of a small Rust Belt college.

While she was being courted for presidential posts at other small colleges, she had an epiphany, after her daughter made a comment about her job search.

“She said, ‘Mom, stop trying to save these small colleges, and find a job you actually like,’” Sproles recalls. “It’s very gratifying to your ego to be recruited and pulled along this path. But she was absolutely right.”

The role of provost, she says, had beaten her down. Much of her job involved listening to great ideas from professors — and regretfully telling them no. “The sort of financial worries that you have are just soul-crushing,” she says, “and I felt helpless to do anything about it.”

Presidents of small colleges and regional universities have difficult jobs that require long hours and lots of travel, not to mention the daunting responsibility of setting the vision for places with stagnant or declining revenue. But the provost can have an even tougher job: to match the energy and hours of a president, sit in as the institution’s leader when the president is away, sell the president’s vision to skeptical faculty members, and shepherd solid research, effective teaching, and innovative pedagogy when there simply isn’t enough money to go around.

Those might be some of the reasons provosts — at small colleges, at least — stay in their jobs fewer years, on average, than presidents do, according to a survey of chief academic officers that was released last week by the Council of Independent Colleges.

Small-college provosts serve an average of 4.6 years, the shortest span since the 2008 recession. More than 90 percent of chief academic officers, or CAOs, reported being satisfied with their jobs, but the survey revealed some potentially troubling trends. Forty percent reported being “very satisfied,” nine points lower than in a 2013 survey. Almost 60 percent said financial limitations were a major frustration of the job, followed by a lack of time to think and persistent resistance from the faculty.

The provost used to be a fixture. Presidents came and went, but the provost — typically drawn from the faculty — was a persistent presence in the academic life of an institution, says Richard Ekman, president of CIC, as the council is known.

“As the challenges to the institutions get tougher, presidents delegate more, and CAOs use up their capital with the members of the campus community faster,” he says. “They take responsibility for some of these very tough decisions where you can’t make everybody happy, and then they burn out.”

Pressure at Public Colleges

Provosts at public colleges have experienced similar pressures. Teresa M. Brown works with hundreds of provosts through the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, known as Aascu, where she is a new vice president leading programs in academic innovation. “Provosts are squeezed between the vision and message of the president and the needs of the faculty,” she says, “and navigating that can be treacherous.”

Before she joined Aascu, in September, she spent the previous eight years as provost at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and the State University of New York at Fredonia — two institutions that were in the midst of fundamental organizational and operational changes. “My job was to lead that,” she says.

Being provost, she says, requires knowledge and abilities that go way beyond traditional academic training: reading a college budget; understanding the intricacies of enrollment, retention, and financial aid; communicating across disciplines; maintaining stamina; and developing a thick skin to absorb the job’s many blows.

“You can’t have a provost who just operates over the academic enterprise and doesn’t engage across the institution,” she says. “There is truly a superhuman element to it.”

Many provosts also find themselves performing some presidential duties by default. Cheryl Hyatt, a higher-education search consultant who is now in the midst of a provost search, says presidents are increasingly called off campus to meet with donors, and provosts wind up covering for them as the institution’s internal leader. Provosts aren’t necessarily prepared for that role, or even interested in it, which can drastically increase the workload.

“‘Burnout’ probably isn’t the right term anymore, because it’s all they’re doing,” she says. “They are expected to communicate with their presidents at all hours, and it becomes much more difficult for them to do the job they anticipated they would be doing.”

If a president is inexperienced, unsure, or difficult to work with, the problems compound. One former provost, who asked not to be named, worked for a president who had a difficult time setting a vision for the institution and hid information from the Board of Trustees. Nepotism at the institution was rampant. The provost was working 70 to 80 hours a week but was told by colleagues to hide that workload because it might not look good.

“I stepped into a snake pit,” says the former provost, who spent three years in the job before quitting.

A Leaking Pipeline to the Presidency

Burnout among provosts might have another effect: The position has traditionally been a steppingstone to a presidency, and with the average age of presidents rising in recent years, institutions need new faces to guide them.

But according to CIC’s survey, only 16 percent of provosts said they would seek a presidency as a next step, while 37 percent said they would not and 31 percent were undecided. Provosts who did not want to ascend to the presidency were wary of the increasingly political nature of the position, its workload, and its focus on external relations and fund raising.

More presidents are coming from outside academe — from business or politics, in particular — so provosts are often drawn into a role as the institution’s expert on higher education. They also often serve as an adviser to help a president acclimate to college culture, says Nicholas R. Santilli, senior director of learning strategy at the Society for College and University Planning, or SCUP, and a former provost at Notre Dame College and John Carroll University, both in Ohio.

Meanwhile, the provost has no one to turn to. “You find yourself often lonely on your campus,” he says, “because it’s hard to have conversations with people that report to you.”

Organizations like SCUP, Aascu, and CIC have all established programs designed to train provosts and connect them with peers at other institutions. The CIC Institute for Chief Academic Officers, which convened this week in Baltimore, offered sessions across a range of topics: risk management, board relations, student retention, and work-life balance. Part of the program is aimed at acclimating new provosts to the job, with the help of experienced peers. Another part is directed at CAOs in their third or fourth year, when job dissatisfaction is at its highest, according to CIC’s survey.

Sproles, the Marietta provost whose daughter sparked her epiphany, walked away from the administrative climb to become director of a teaching and learning center at the U.S. Naval Academy.

“Now I am in a job where I say yes to people, and it’s wonderful,” she says.

Sproles says the most difficult aspect of being provost was how the job decimated the simplistic notions about higher education that she had held as a faculty member. Just as she tried to remember what it was like to be a student when she became a professor, she wanted to continue to identify with professors as she became a department head, dean, and provost. But knowledge of a college’s budget, enrollment, and regulatory hurdles — along with the culture of mistrust between faculty and administration — limited her ideas and aspirations. In time, the easy fixes for higher education that she had dreamed up as a professor became impossibly complex.

“I don’t think I was able to change academic culture, which is what I really thought I would be able to do,” she says. Now she is still working on making connections between her peers — perhaps with more success, or at least more satisfaction. “It’s a happy ending.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.