Spotlight

NBN's guide to the provost.

Right-hand man

Outgoing provost Dan Linzer has left his mark on NU.

BY LAUREN BALLY ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA KUMER

If you participated in Dance Marathon in 1991, you’d find, among the masses of undergraduates, future Provost Dan Linzer sweating on the dance floor. As part of the first faculty group to participate in DM, Linzer told The Daily Northwestern that getting out with the “young folks” was a bit daunting, but he and his compatriots helped to raise nearly $190,000 for charity, helping set what was then DM’s record for donations. But even before his dancin’ days, Linzer was making an impression. He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology as an assistant professor in 1984, and in 1985 he was named one of 20 Searle Scholars, a prestigious award from the Chicago Community Trust for younger researchers that paid $180,000 over three years. The next school year, he was named to ASG’s Faculty Honor Roll.

After nearly 20 years as a professor, including time as an associate dean, Linzer was announced as the new dean of Weinberg in February 2001, replacing Eric Sundquist. He took over the position’s responsibilities in 2002. During his five years as Weinberg’s dean, Linzer helped to pioneer new programs like Global Health Studies and the Kellogg Certificate in Financial Economics, expand liberal arts curricula, and establish the Alice Kaplan Humanities Program. Under his watch, applications to Weinberg increased by more than 60 percent.

In September 2007, President Henry Bienen selected Linzer as his right-hand man, a position officially known as the provost. Although his almost decade-long tenure as provost has been filled with plenty of ups and downs, Linzer’s departure from Northwestern at the end of this academic year will affect many. After more than 30 years at Northwestern, he will no doubt leave a legacy – both good and bad – for many years to come. Here are five lasting impacts from Linzer’s time as provost.

Northwestern Strategic Plan OCTOBER 2011

One of the ways Linzer will likely influence Northwestern after his retirement is through Northwestern’s Strategic Plan, which was unveiled in October 2011. The plan identified four overarching goals: to discover creative solutions to contemporary challenges across the world, extend academic experiences beyond the classroom, create a more inclusive and united community on campus and connect Northwestern to Chicago and global communities.

These plans have resulted in updated facilities, increased academic opportunities for students and strengthened alumni relations. They have been spurred on by more than $3 billion of donations since the fundraising campaign launched in March 2014.

Institute for Sustainability and Energy 2013

The Institute for Sustainability and Energy was originally launched as a five-year research initiative under then-President Henry Bienen in 2008 to address a gap on research in energy and sustainability. Linzer was responsible for approving the funding that created the institute in 2013. Since its creation, the institute has created new opportunities for students to pursue an interdisciplinary curriculum through nine new classes that are available to all undergraduate students, formed a collaboration space in the J wing of Tech, funded innovative projects like building solar cars and launched small companies like SiNode, an energy-efficient alternative to typical lithium batteries.

Although the role of provost has changed significantly in the last six decades, current Provost Dan Linzer also has a lot more to juggle than his predecessors. When the position was first created, only three people reported to the provost: the vice president and dean of faculties, the vice president for medical affairs, and the director for university libraries. Now, Linzer presides over an enormous university bureaucracy, including an office of 35 administrators

“[Provost Linzer] was on board right from the word ‘go’ and it’s done wonders for promoting the whole field and really consolidating things that have allowed us to move forward in a vigorous and energetic way,” says ISEN Executive Director Michael Wasielewski.

Global Strategy Task Force MAY 2015

After Roberta Buffett donated more than $100 million to Northwestern in May 2015, the largest single gift in Northwestern history, Linzer launched a 12-person Global Strategy Task Force to explore ways Northwestern could use the money to increase its global activity and engagement over the next 10 years. According to Kellogg Dean Mary Blount, who co-chaired the project with Executive Vice President Nim Chinniah, the task force engaged approximately 500 faculty, students and staff during the 18 months before they released their report last November.

Blout wrote in an email, “Our hope is that the Task Force’s work will catalyze significant global activity across the university, both in enabling the university to expand our global horizons and to integrate global perspectives more deeply into our intellectual life within the U.S.”

The task force developed six “Global Themes” that Northwestern should focus on to shape its global strategy and action, though it remains unclear exactly how the funding will be delegated.

Karl Eikenberry Appointment to Buffett Institute 2015

In 2015, the newly created Buffett Institute for Global Studies needed an executive director. In November, Schapiro and Linzer named former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry to fill the role. However, his appointment was met with disapproval from Northwestern faculty and students, most notably political science professor Jacqueline Stevens. Stevens said Northwestern’s trustees ignored normal hiring practices in their selection of Eikenberry, who lacked a Ph.D. and did not make a campus visit prior to the appointment. She later wrote in a letter cosigned by professors Jorge Coronado and Michael P. Ginsburg that Eikenberry’s refusal to distribute his CV and his “deeply disturbing statements on behalf of the Rwandan government and its military” made him an unsuitable candidate to lead the institute.

Linzer, along with Schapiro, Eikenberry defended before the Faculty Senate at ASG. However, his defense sometimes put him on shaky ground – he called the opposition to Eikenberry a “conspiracy theory” and warned then-ASG President Noah Star that a student-proposed resolution to rescind the appointment could be grounds for legal defamation. In the end, however, Linzer emailed Buffett faculty in April 2016 that Eikenberry would not become the executive director for the institute.

Linzer, along with Schapiro, Eikenberry defended before the Faculty Senate at ASG. However, his defense sometimes put him on shaky ground – he called the opposition to Eikenberry a “conspiracy theory” and warned then-ASG President Noah Star that

Ending Women’s Center Counseling

SEPTEMBER 2016

In September 2016, Linzer sent an email to Northwestern undergraduate students stating that counseling services would no longer be offered at the Women’s Center, and would instead be absorbed by Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). For students like SESP junior Ariana Hammersmith, the decision made accessing mental health care more difficult because of the long wait-times at CAPS. However, Linzer defended the decision, pointing to the fact that CAPS had lifted its 12-session limit.

“Initially, I was shocked and disappointed when I heard counseling services at the Women’s Center would end. I was abroad and struggling to find short-term counseling, so the news that I wouldn’t be able to return when I got back to Evanston was frankly devastating,” Hammersmith says. “I’d like to see the reinstatement of counseling at the Women’s Center and the expansion of CAPS by increasing funding and the size of the staff in order to reduce wait times and provide a long-term model of mental health care.”

A brief history of the provost

BY DANIEL FERNANDEZ

At Northwestern, the provost serves as the chief academic officer, holding them responsible for overseeing all of the school’s academic affairs. Despite the position’s importance today, the provost is actually a rather new addition to the university’s bureaucracy — Northwestern had been around for more than 100 years before we got our first provost.

The position emerged as a part of a restructuring plan brought to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees in March 1969 by Booz, Allen and Hamilton, a Chicago consulting firm (and the same folks who employed Edward Snowden while he worked for the NSA).

Basically, the plan recommended that the responsibilities of Northwestern’s president be split into two jobs: a chancellor who handled external affairs like fundraising, and a president who handled day to day administration. A provost was also created to oversee all academic affairs, including the recruitment of faculty. It also added a vice-president for medical affairs to head Northwestern’s medical school in Chicago.

In the following months, the recommendations that Booz Allen and Hamilton made to the Board of Trustees were not made public; someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

This message, which many saw as culturally insensitive, combined with an earlier instance of alleged racism at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, created a brief but intense fervor within the Yale community.

One of the enduring images to emerge from the protests was of Holloway standing on a flat sculpture called the Women’s Table above a frustrated crowd of students at the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Library, more commonly known as “Cross Campus.” Holloway says he came to Cross Campus that day to support students who were chalking affirmations for women of color at Yale and to bear witness.

But soon after arriving, students gathered around Holloway. First, there were a handful who made demands for a more definitive response from Holloway and Yale’s administration. They cited an instance a year earlier where Holloway had sent an email in less than 24 hours responding to swastikas being chalked on various buildings around campus. He tried to explain the response to the swastika incident differed from the one at SAE because there was no alleged perpetrator, though he now says he wished he had done more to make clear to students that the SAE investigation was being taken seriously.

Within a matter of minutes, the small crowd had ballooned into a throng of students. And what happened next, according to Holloway, was remarkable.

“Students started telling me their pain – and it was brutal,” Holloways says. “What wounded me was their deep disappointment, that they had expected better.”

Holloway knew he had to listen. He wanted to capture the pain and anger, the disappointment and confusion, all that raw emotion the students were feeling. He wanted them to know he heard every word they said, witnessed every tear they shed, and was moved. Although the students may not have known the whole story behind the SAE investigation or may have said things that upset him, he knew their feelings were genuine, and he didn’t know how to respond except to acknowledge it. And to the students, that made a difference.

“There was a lot of pain and struggle going on in the public sphere, and a big struggle for us was that administrators didn’t seem to be listening,” says Isaiah Genece, a fourth-year undergraduate student and Yale freshman counselor. “The first and foremost thing he did was listen. It says a lot that he was willing to put his own concerns aside and hear all the words and concerns of the student body, especially in contrast to other administrators.”

In the moment, Holloway says his solemnity may have gotten the better of him. In trying to be Dean of Yale College – the dean of everyone, not just those students on Cross Campus chalking and protesting – he may have overcorrected and been too restrained. Maybe, in retrospect, he didn’t do enough to show his support for the students in public.

But Peter Huang, president of Yale College Council (YCC), has worked with Holloway on multiple projects and has seen his commitment to the undergraduate community first-hand. He collaborated with Holloway on initiatives to improve mental health services and residential communities at Yale, and says many students have talked about Holloway’s devotion to the school following the protests.

“There was a lot of anger and a lot of confusion about what it meant to be an undergraduate student at Yale,” Huang says. “I was very glad and grateful to have Dean Holloway there. He was very emotionally present during the protests.”

Although Holloway sometimes wonders if he was too restrained, some think he was too vocal in his support. And things were ugly: Erika and Nicholas Christakis resigned from their positions at Silliman last July, and some students refused to shake Nicholas’ hand when they accepted their diploma during graduation. These critics say Holloway offered too much praise, and as a result, he may have threatened the rigorous intellectual freedom Yale has long prided itself on.

Zachary Young, who was a resident of Silliman when the protests occurred, wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal in June 2016. In it, he said the Christakises were damaged by a “witch-hunt mentality,” and that Holloway did little to avert or ameliorate the situation when “he offered his ‘unambiguous’ support for the Intercultural Affairs Committee’s guidelines, calling their intent ‘exactly right.’”

Holloway says the Christakises may have inadvertently stepped into a minefield when Erika published her letter, but he also emphasizes they were not removed from their jobs: Nicholas still heads his lab, and Yale has reached out to Erika to teach her lecture course again, though she has not accepted the offer, according to Holloway. He also says colleges and universities like Yale are places of immense passion, and that disagreement is a sign of a healthy academic community.

But he also speaks of a need for a renewed sense of respect and dignity. “We are all losing faith in one another – that we can actually talk to people we disagree with and recognize that we actually share things in common,” he says. “I’m not trying to wage an ideological campaign. I will support the students with whom I disagree as much as I support the ones I agree with.”

As Holloway begins his transition to Northwestern – as of January, he’s already made several visits to campus to meet with faculty and administrators – it is likely that he will be asked to engage these sorts of uncomfortable topics once again, whether it relates to how buildings should be named (Yale renamed Calhoun College this February, in a controversial decision that contradicted statements made by university president Peter Salovey in April), the nature of student protest or how academic freedoms ought to be defended.

But Holloway feels confident that Northwestern is “in amazing shape,” and he, his wife, Aisling Colón, and his two children are looking forward to the move. In fact, they’re already singing praises of the town’s “Midwestern charm.”

But back at Yale, many students will likely miss Holloway's calm voice in these debates. “He’s always pointed us in the right direction,” Huang says. “Northwestern is lucky to have him.”

in fact, even after the files moved to University Archives, it was impossible to access them without the written permission of the university president until 1995. At the time, the editorial board for The Daily Northwestern speculated the secrecy was because “many of the recommendations were controversial.” This was, in no small part, because Allen (of Booz, Allen and Hamilton) sat on the Board of Trustees and authorized the changes proposed by the study, in addition to representing the firm which was ultimately responsible for leading the search efforts to fill these various positions. It cost the university an undisclosed sum of money, but the firm screened and collected biographic information for more than 300 candidates for the various positions, so it’s hard to imagine it was cheap. These concerns were only magnified by the fact that Northwestern had reduced raises among faculty that year, and saw various construction projects fall behind schedule.

Despite these murmurings, the restructuring plan was approved, with then-University President Dr. J. Roscoe Miller serving as chancellor and former vice-president and dean of faculties, with Payton S. Wild becoming the first provost.