The Education of a Provost By Janel Curry
I had just finished speaking with a group of students recently returned from a semester abroad. Their friends and families would ask them about what they had seen and done in Russia or Australia, but they had difficulty expressing the full meaning of their experience. It had been, after all, about hearing, seeing, and smelling a new culture; about understanding and knowing a new place; about feeling comfortable and confident with their ability to navigate what it meant to be there. As I listened to their stories, I was struck by how such multisensory experiences shape us—not just as undergraduates in college but continually, throughout our careers. Maybe the connections were heightened for me because I had just completed my first month as provost of a liberal-arts college outside Boston. An essential reason I took the job was that it demanded the use of everything I had learned and experienced—a tapestry of skills, knowledge, and wisdom. And that got me reflecting on the specific experiences that had shaped me for this new role. In my 30 years in higher education, I have been through two core-curriculum revisions, led overseas classes, written grants, worked on outcomes-based teaching and learning assessment, taught courses with lab sections and without, taught classes with service learning and without, and done research with undergraduates and without. I have experienced dysfunctional committees and ones that did a profoundly good job of assessing a problem. But just as a list of places visited by those students did not sum up their experiences abroad, my own list of committees, courses, and tasks does not capture the experience or understanding needed to be a provost. I come from an egalitarian, social-justice-oriented, small-town family in the Midwest. So I had to become comfortable with money—or, to put it better, with progress via philanthropy. When I was a high-school junior, I received a call from a local lawyer who wanted to meet with me. I remember my confusion: Why would any lawyer want to talk to a 16-year-old? At that meeting I was told that a
local philanthropist had awarded me the equivalent of a full scholarship to college. What an incredible gift. As a result, I was able to take advantage of opportunities I’d never thought possible, like study abroad, which changed the course of my life. When I became a college administrator and worked on a scholarship agreement with a donor, I immediately wrote a note of thanks to the philanthropist’s foundation that had once supported me. I became who I am because of the generosity of philanthropic giving. I grew up in an era that encouraged the questioning of authority. Consequently I had to develop a more nuanced understanding of “position” through holding various positions. At my previous institution, for instance, I came to the campus with a one-year appointment in an endowed chair. Someone who became a close friend occupied that same chaired position the following year. We often laughed at our shared experience of being taken much more seriously during the year we held the chair. Likewise, when I became a dean, all of a sudden it was not my voice that was heard but the dean’s voice. Of course, that meant I lost authority when I lost the title. People in the finance office quit answering my e-mails soon after it was announced that I was leaving my deanship. But I didn’t take it personally. Provosts must take responsibility for making hard decisions and communicating them to others. I began to learn how to do that early in my academic career. I was a junior faculty member serving on an undergraduate honors committee that had found several theses to be wanting, but nobody wanted to communicate the bad news to the faculty supervisors. I took on the task. Many years later, as chair of the board of a nonprofit, I had to eliminate three positions. As I was talking with the three people in those positions, I remember saying to myself, “Well, this is good practice for communicating tough reality.” Such experiences helped me realize that procrastination in such situations does not serve either the institution or the individuals well.