Chief academic officer

A provost is a senior academic administrator. At many institutions of higher education, they are the chief academic officer, a role that may be combined with being deputy to the chief executive officer. They may also be the chief executive officer of a university, of a branch campus of a university, or of a college within a university.

Duties, role, and selection

The specific duties and areas of responsibility for a provost vary from one institution to another, but usually include supervision and oversight of curricular, instructional, and research affairs.

The various deans of a university's schools, colleges, or faculties typically report to the provost, or jointly to them and the institution's chief executive officer—which office may be called president, chancellor, vice-chancellor or rector. Likewise do the heads of the various interdisciplinary units and academic support functions (such as libraries, student services, the registrar, admissions, and information technology) usually report there. The provost, in turn, is responsible to the institution's chief executive officer and governing board or boards (variously called its trustees, the regents, the governors, or the corporation) for oversight of all educational affairs and activities, including research and academic personnel.

In many but not all North American institutions, the provost or equivalent is the second-ranking officer in the administrative hierarchy. Often the provost may serve as acting chief executive officer during a vacancy in that office or when the incumbent is absent from campus for prolonged periods. In these institutions, the title of provost is sometimes combined with those of ''senior vice president'', ''executive vice president'', ''executive vice chancellor'', or the like, to denote that officer's high standing.

Provosts often receive staff support or delegate line responsibility for certain administrative functions to one or more subordinates variously called ''assistant provost'', ''associate provost'', ''vice provost'', or ''deputy provost''. The deputy provost is often the right-hand person of the provost who assumes the provost's responsibilities in the provost's absence.

Provosts are often chosen by a search committee made up of faculty members, and are almost always drawn from the 'tenured faculty' or 'professional administrators' with academic credentials, either at the institution or from other institutions.

Titles and other uses

At some North American research universities and liberal arts colleges, other titles may be used in place of or in combination with provost, such as chief academic officer or vice president for academic affairs (or, rarely, academic vice-president, academic vice rector, or vice president for education). At smaller independent liberal arts colleges, the chief academic officer may carry the title "dean of the college" or "dean of the faculty" in addition to or instead of ''provost''. For example, at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the dean of the faculty is also the vice president for academic affairs and is the second-highest administrator, directly beneath the president.

Sometimes the chief academic officer or chief medical officer of a university medical center (also academic medical center) holds the title of provost.

In some universities, the chief administrative officer of a large academic division may be a provost. Finally, in some colleges and universities, the title of provost (and the function of deputy to the president or chancellor) may be separate from the function of chief academic officer.

Universities using provost in the title of their chief executive officer include University College London and Trinity College, Dublin.. The title is also used for the heads of Oriel, Queen's and Worcester colleges in the University of Oxford; King's College, Cambridge; and St Leonard's College, St Andrews. The Provost of Eton is the chair of the governors of Eton College. Many universities also use provost as the title for the chief executive officers of their international branch campuses. Some of these universities also use provost (often in combination as "provost and deputy vice-chancellor" or similar) for their chief academic officer.

History

The title "provost" (Latin: ''praepositus'') has been used in England from medieval times for the head of colleges such as Oriel College, Oxford and Eton College. In the context of local government, the title is even older; see civil provost. More recent colleges have adopted the same usage, e.g. the principal of University College London was retitled as provost in 1906, and Durham University adopted the title for University College Stockton in 1999 (until it was split into two new colleges in 2001).

Following its usage for the heads of colleges, some multi-campus state university systems in the United States have used ''provost'' as the title of the head of a branch campus. For example, the chancellors of the Newark and Camden campuses of Rutgers University in New Jersey were formerly known as provosts. A similar practice arose in Britain in the early 21st century with the establishment of international branch campuses, many of which were headed by provosts.

The first use of the title in American and Canadian higher education was in 1854 at the University (then the College) of Pennsylvania. The post was created under Benjamin Franklin as president of the board of trustees, and while Franklin was in this position he remained heavily involved in the college. However, on Franklin's retirement in 1755 the provost took up the more usual (at the time) role of head of the college, which it retained until three re-establishment of the presidency of the university in 1930. At Columbia University, the board of trustees established the office of provost in 1811, only to abolish it five years later. The Trustees and the president of the university re-established the office of provost in 1912. Although the precise title of the office has changed over time, its responsibility as Columbia's chief academic officer has remained constant.

Other North American universities and colleges created provosts as heads of academic affairs during and after World War II, when dramatic increases in undergraduate enrollments (due to the G.I. Bill) and the increased complexity of higher education administration led many chief executive officers to adopt a more corporate governing structure. By the 1960s, most of the other Ivy League institutions ( Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and Brown) had provosts (or equivalents), as did other private research universities such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, Rice University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Emory University, Wake Forest University and Duke University.

At Harvard University, the office of provost has had two distinct incarnations. The first was during World War II and the immediate postwar era. James Bryant Conant, the president of the university from 1933 to 1953, asked the Harvard Corporation (the more senior of the two governing boards) to create the office of provost in October 1945, at time when he (Conant) spent a great deal of time in Washington, D.C. as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. A provision was created where the dean of the Faculty of Arts of Sciences (FAS) would concurrently serve as provost. Conant appointed historian Paul Herman Buck, in which capacity he had oversight of FAS (which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Extension School, the Summer School, and what is now called the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) and its affiliated laboratories, research centers, and museums. However, he had no authority over Harvard's professional schools (at that time, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Faculty of Medicine, the School of Public Health, and the Graduate Schools of Business Administration, Design, Education, and Public Administration).

That provost's office was eliminated when Conant retired from Harvard's presidency in 1953. During the presidencies of Nathan Marsh Pusey (1953–1971) and Derek C. Bok (1971–1993), the deans of Harvard's nine faculties reported directly to the president, with the dean of FAS being '' primus inter pares''. The second incarnation began in 1993, when then Harvard President Neil Rudenstine asked the corporation to create the provostship as a second university-wide academic officer, reporting to its president.

A section of Harvard's 1997 Re-accreditation Report for the New England Commission of Colleges and Schools reads:

The Provost at Harvard acts as an extension of the President. He is the second academic officer, after the President, having purview of the entire University. The Provost has special responsibility for fostering intellectual interactions across the University, including the five Interfaculty Initiatives (environment, ethics and the professions, schooling and children, mind/brain/behavior, and health policy). The Provost also acts to help improve the quality and efficiency of central services organized at Harvard under the aegis of the Vice Presidents.

The use of provost as the title of the chief academic officer of a university (as opposed to its historic use for the head of a college) is relatively recent in the UK. One of the earliest was Imperial College London, where the first provost was appointed in 2012, splitting off the chief academic officer role previously carried out by the rector (chief executive) of the university. The vice-chancellor (chief executive) of Durham University praised this arrangement in 2014, saying "Personally I believe that we should move to this model – Imperial ollegehas done it, I believe the LSE ondon School of Economicsis moving in that direction and a few others are as well. I think it's certainly what we must do to maintain our status as an international university." Durham appointed their first deputy vice-chancellor and provost in 2016.

See also

* Director (education)
* Postgraduate education
* Principal (university)
* Professor
* Undergraduate education

References

"History of Cornell's Provosts""About the Provost"
Cornell University Office of the Provost.
* Freeland, Richard M. (1992). ''Academia's Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970''. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Keller, Morton & Keller, Phyllis (2001). ''Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University''. New York: Oxford University Press.

"Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs"
Trinity College (Connecticut)

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Academic administrators
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