ALL THE RIGHT MOVES

ASEE Prism, Apr 2006 by Sanoff, Alvin P

Engineering deans are increasingly being tapped for the position of provost. Search committees at a number of universities have discovered the value of an engineer's skill sets.

LIKE MANY ENGINEERING DEANS, John Andersen of Carnegie Mellon University would receive periodic calls from search firms asking if he wanted to be considered for a high-level administrative post at another institution. But Anderson enjoyed serving as dean at the Pittsburgh university and invariably told the head hunters he was not interested.

Then he received a call that intrigued him. The search firm executive told him that case Western Reserve University in Cleveland was looking for a provost. Anderson was interested because of the university's strong academic reputation. The fact that he had relatives living in the Cleveland area was a bonus. Two years ago, he took the position at Case Western. "I felt it was a new challenge, a chance to do something different," he says.

Anderson is not alone. In the past five years, more than a half dozen engineering deans have become provosts the chief academic officers of their institutions. Provosts stand second only to the president in most university hierarchies. In addition to Case Western, institutions that now have former engineering deans as provosts include Boston University, Drexel University, the University of California at Merced, the University of Florida, the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Southern California. Another former engineering dean, Linda Katehi, will soon become provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It's too early to say whether this constitutes a trend, but Robert Atwell, former president of the American Council on Education, who has also been an executive at a higher education search firm, thinks that as more emphasis is placed on the importance of science, more engineering deans will become provosts. Atwell says whether an engineering dean lands the job of provost often depends on which factions within an institution dominate the search process. "If it is dominated by the faculty, an engineering dean probably will not get far because the faculty is probably arts and sciences-oriented," he says. "But if the board of trustees is dominant, then an engineer has a better shot."

Historically, engineering deans have had less opportunity to become chief academic officers than deans in the arts and sciences for an obvious reason: Many colleges and universities lack engineering programs. "Search committees are always looking for a fit," says Madeleine Green, a vice president at the American Council on Education, who is an expert on leadership development. At schools without engineering programs, the fit is not apparent. "Search committees view engineering deans as not enough like them," explains Green.

Given the importance of fit, it's no surprise that engineering deans have become provosts at research universities. Many of the institutions are headed by presidents who themselves have backgrounds in engineering or science.

The provosts are discovering that their experience as engineering deans prepared them well for many facets of their jobs. "Engineers tend to be problem solvers, and provosts have to solve a lot of problems," says Bill Destler, provost at the University of Maryland at College Park since 2001. "The provost's office is the place where a lot of the most vexing institutional problems come to rest."

Developing and implementing budgets and strategic plans are a major part of the provost's job. "When provosts get together, their biggest concerns are budget, budget and budget," says Anderson, who has had to grapple with a $40 million deficit. Recently, a majority of Case Western's arts and sciences faculty, who constitute a small part of the university's professoriate, passed a resolution saying they had no confidence in either the university's president or Anderson. The faculty members are dissatisfied with the way the budget shortfall has been handled.

In their capacity as engineering deans, the provosts had a great deal of experience wrestling with budgets. "There are some skills that transfer from any level of academic administration," says David Campbell of Boston University, who was the school's engineering dean before being elevated to provost last year. Anderson says that he now has deans reporting to him who have the same problems with budget, faculty and other matters that he encountered as dean. A key part of the provost's responsibilities is ensuring the quality of undergraduate education. Anderson says that, too, is something engineering deans are knowledgeable about, although they often don't get the credit they deserve for making undergraduate education a priority.

A BIGGER STAGE

FOR MOST, moving from engineering dean to provost means adjusting to the much larger scope of the job. There are many more meetings to attend, and the hours are longer. Provosts work 60-70 hours a week, including weekends, and can spend up to 10 hours a day in meetings. "If you are in meetings all the time, you can't find time to think about the larger issues you would like to address," Anderson says. "I do my thinking on the weekends and at night." At Maryland, Destler attended 3,000 meetings last year. He manages to carve out thinking time during regular working hours by keeping meetings brief. His secretary schedules meetings for 30 minutes, but he keeps them shorter. He jokes that he had a meeting with two campus officials and on the way out heard one say to the other, "I can't believe we got a whole 1 5 minutes out of him."