Since I will not long be able to
disguise the genre of of this post, the parental brag, I must at the
very least make a few preliminary remarks by way of extenuation. I recognize that the most important thing I
have done with my life is to have been a father. Years of experience and observation, however,
have led me to a tempered and perhaps even pessimistic view of parental
agency. It is this. While there is nothing parents can do to guarantee that their children will turn
out well, there are about a dozen things they can do to make it likely that
they will turn out badly. While it is
only natural to delight in the achievements of one’s offspring, it would be
folly even in imagination to take credit for them. One can, however, be grateful for the hand of Providence. Furthermore as a student of classical culture
I am aware that not everybody wants to hear you going on about how great your
kids are. One could cite numerous
instances in which parental boasting got so out of hand as to cross the line
between bad manners and actual tragedy. Think of poor Niobe transformed forever into a
weeping statue!
Now, having dutifully laid out the
prefatory required legal boiler-plate, I have to report that it was announced two days ago that our daughter, Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, is to be the new
Provost of New York University. This is
a really big deal, and the reason I am putting it in my blog is that the
message is too long to fit onto a bumper sticker on my pick-up truck. “My Daughter is an Honor Student” just
doesn’t cut it.
There is a quaint, old-fashioned
character to many of our academic titles—our deans and vice-chancellors
and such—that recalls the real or imagined medieval origins of the offices they
denote. A provost, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology,
means simply an “official set over others (in various specialized
senses).” Some version of the word
appeared quite early in most of the European languages, including Old English,
deriving from the Latin pre + positus, “set before”. Like numerous other such words, provost “came
into” English twice, one through the Latin and once through French, so that in
certain settings it is pronounced in the French manner, without the concluding
consonants, as in the military term provost
marshal, or Provo, Utah—named after an early French trapper, Etienne
Provost. The top academic official of
Worcester College, Oxford, is a “provost”, and in my time there the Latin
pronunciation vied with the French.
What the word means in contemporary
academic English is a dauntingly challenging and important job. In 1963 Clark Kerr, the President of the
University of California, gave a series of lectures at Harvard in which he
introduced the term multiversity. It was needed, he argued, because the
incremental complexity of American higher education had in effect left the
comparative simplicity of the university
behind. How do you?—how can you?--govern an institution that has
within it, not always harmonious as they jostle for finite resources, a liberal
arts college, advanced scientific laboratories, an engineering school, a law
school, a medical school, a business school, a dozen other professional
schools, etc., etc.
By chance that was the very year,
1963, that I took my doctoral degree; and it was about that time that most of
the larger American institutions of higher education adopted the position of
provost. Certainly my own years of
active academic life were ones in which the demands on college presidents expanded
nearly to the breaking point. Almost all
large schools in this country have now gone through an administrative
restructuring designed to liberate the President for the already crushing
responsibilities of the unique leadership role.
The provostial job description varies somewhat from institution to
institution, but the job’s major elements are the same. “The Provost is the
University's chief academic officer,” reads the official NYU document “who is
responsible for setting the University's academic strategy and priorities,
working closely with the deans of the schools, and identifying and cultivating
interdisciplinary areas of excellence and collaboration within and between
schools. All deans and directors of schools
and institutes report to the Provost. The Provost also has direct
responsibility for all academic support units. In addition, the Provost has
institutional responsibility for the allocation of financial resources in
accordance with academic priorities, working closely with the Office of the
Executive Vice President.”
To me, that is a
rather terrifying document. New York
University has an annual operating budget of several billions of dollars. Even in the context of New York City it is a
huge private employer. It has nearly
sixty thousand students, fifty thousand of them undergraduates. The administrative apparatus required of such
an operation is formidable. Furthermore,
it is an ambitious institution at a major inflection point. A new President, Andrew Hamilton, the former
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, has been in office for only a few
months. Our daughter—my little girl!—is going to be his
lieutenant in guiding such a great enterprise.
The concept of parental pride, as expansive as it is, seems inadequate
to the task. You can see why I had to
write about it. Once every five years is, I hope, not excessive.
