What a Provost Knows and Can't Tell

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By JAMES J. O'DONNELL

I used to slouch and shamble. I stumbled around campus, head down, eyes focused someplace just short of the ground, preoccupied with some abstruse question. Could Keats's "To Autumn" really be a political tract? Does the Latin word quin really appear always and only after a negative? Where did I see that article about donkeys and magic rituals that I need for my next chapter? Most important, how would I time my arrival at the tenure meeting to evade conversation with my colleagues? (I once mistimed my approach and dove for cover into the men's room, only to find four other colleagues scrupulously avoiding eye contact.)

Then one day, for reasons too preposterous to recall, they made me provost. My first question was one I would often be asked in the coming years: "What does a provost do, actually?"

I didn't know what to expect, but what I least anticipated was how the new job would improve my posture. No more the half-fixed gaze to the ground — far too hostile. I now look about brightly, cheerfully greeting anyone who recognizes me; it's part of the job. But my eyes also travel farther upward, and that's what really keeps me upright and healthy. That roof over there — does it have a couple more winters left? What about the windows in that one: Didn't somebody say that those classrooms are drafty because of ill-fitting frames? Those are now my burning questions.

I soon realized that a provost's posture isn't incidental to the job, but reflects something important about the way our institutions work. Our traditions of govern-ance say that faculty members guide the institution, and although we all work hard to make that true, it never really has been. It may now be less true than ever, and there are good reasons why.

Academic administrators have long allowed faculty members to do their jobs unencumbered by concerns about leaky roofs and drafty windows. The abbot and cellarer of a monastery — a structure that figures in our institutions' founding mythology — did as much for the monks. As little as two generations ago, one Ivy League university's annual budget was set by three men on a porch on Martha's Vineyard, as faculty members went about their business. No more.

Times have changed — not because administrators' intentions have changed, or because professors are suddenly less distracted by scholarship and teaching, but because of the burgeoning complexity of the overall enterprise. The compliance officer, the chief benefits officer, the institutional review board, the vice president for safety — those offices and functions are now necessary, and many of those administrators ask faculty members to help (the kind of activity we call "service," the better to make people feel put upon). But there's much more going on.

Those of us who choose to accept leadership roles soon wake up to the fact that a thousand incremental changes have made our institution something very different from what it was before — something bigger and far more demanding. The professor-turned-provost, however engaged an academic she or he may remain, is now a different kind of creature, and improved posture is only an outward sign of it.

The provost knows things that the faculty members don't. And a lot of them have to do with money.

I know that this year's operating budget is the least of our worries. The capital budget, the institution's debt capacity, the current debt load, the anticipated need for significant maintenance (deferred or not) — those each cost a lot of money and fluctuate broadly, sometimes unpredictably: "Mr. Provost, that roof on the dining hall? I know you don't want to put a new roof on during sleet storms in December, but ceiling tiles in the vegetarian stir-fry just aren't acceptable." (That particular dining hall was in the residence hall where I lived at the time, so we all spent December listening to the contractors drill through concrete to put in the drains. It felt as if everyone in the building was having dental work at the same time.)

I know a lot about people. The tenure documents that I see every year provide a window into the private workings of departments, throwing light on the issues that faculty members will bring to the administration. Show me a tenure dossier from your department, and I can immediately tell you whether your group is on the rise or decline, whether it is a collegial place to work or a bus station, and whether we're going to have to hire an outside chairman in five years to unleash its energy.

I also know how much everybody makes. This means that from my first day on the job, I have known who was really who — which outspoken faculty leader was the lowest-paid social scientist on campus, and which quiet workers, whom I never saw, were the real high performers. (State universities usually have to publish this information, but they also have salary scales and controls that make the data far less revealing than at private institutions, where the same information is normally kept confidential.) Every institution has an invisible hierarchy, and the provost may be the only person who sees it.

Finally, I know where the messes are. Although individual cases of misconduct, concealed poor health, or financial ineptitude rarely amount to much, such cases, as in a Brueghel painting, add important detail to the picture of institutional culture that can never be made public. The challenge for me is to keep the messes in perspective, and to remember that our successes vastly outnumber and outweigh them.

That's the burden of the job: knowing all the things that others don't know or would rather not know. Much that I know I can't talk about, and I have had to get used to being the object of (usually) undeserved suspicion. Because I know so much, my actions are not fully intelligible to those who observe them. The hardest part of being provost has been learning that it's right and proper that I be suspected — that such vigilance is part of what keeps our institution healthy.

In the end, the burden of knowledge is worth it. The pleasures of the job are many, not least of which is understanding this marvelous institution so well — a Rube Goldberg creation that really does work, and very well indeed. And the opportunity to kibitz on the intellectual lives of more than 500 keenly intelligent and resourceful faculty members is an immense privilege. Even cleaning up their messes and fixing their leaky roofs gives me great satisfaction.

James J. O'Donnell is provost and a professor of classics at Georgetown University.