Leading and Managing: My Experience in Serving in Academic Leadership

Abstract

Over the last 23 years, I have served in several leadership roles with progressively increasing responsibilities. At the University of Michigan (UM), I served as a program director and in two different associate dean positions in the College of Engineering and as vice president for research for the university, leading a research enterprise spanning three campuses. Since July 1, 2019, I have been serving as senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia (UGA). In this chapter, I first discuss the role of the provost generally, the broad responsibilities of the provost at UGA, and the academic initiatives led by the Office of the Provost. I then reflect upon my journey in academic leadership and how my various roles at the University of Michigan have prepared me for the role of provost. Finally, I summarize the lessons learned from these leadership roles.

1 Introduction

On July 1, 2019, I began my service as senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia (UGA) (Hu named senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, n.d.). As the first public university chartered in the country, UGA is Georgia’s flagship, land-grant, and sea-grant university. Its mission is “to teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.” UGA has been ranked by US News and World Report as one of the top 20 universities for 7 years in a row while providing a significant economic impact to the state of Georgia. I was attracted to the UGA provost role because of the university’s excellence in education, innovation, public service, and outreach. UGA also has the foundation for preeminence. The university has made significant investments in the learning environment for the last several years, which has led to impressive student success, the rise of its academic reputation, and an improvement in its rankings. UGA has reached a record 6-year undergraduate student completion rate of 88.1% (UGA achieves record-breaking completion rates, n.d.). The student life experience is also highly positive as evidenced by the number 2 ranking in Niche’s list of colleges with the Best Student Life in America.

After serving in the provost’s role for 3 years, I wrote a short reflection on my LinkedIn account on July 1, 2022, which summarizes the momentum of the university.

Today marks the beginning of my fourth year as senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia. It has been an exciting but surely challenging three years as 29 of the past 36 months were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the significant challenges, UGA has been able to continue advancing excellence in the classrooms, in the labs, and out in the fields and communities, thanks to the dedication and perseverance of our excellent faculty, staff, and students. UGA undergraduate and graduate enrollment is reaching an all-time high and the interest in a UGA degree continues to rise. Our research enterprise continues to expand, in traditional disciplines and new emerging fields. Several new academic initiatives will further advance UGA academic excellence, including Active Learning, School of Computing, Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture, Johnny Isakson Center for Brain Science and Neurological Diseases, the University of Georgia Research Institute, and our ongoing Presidential Faculty Hiring Initiatives in Data Science and AI. UGA’s impact on the State and the nation continues to grow through innovative partnerships with organizations and communities. Thanks to all of you for working closely together.

2 Role of Provost: Leading Versus Managing

The provost is typically the chief academic officer in American universities. To better understand the role of the provost, it may be necessary to examine its history as the public may not fully understand the position and the responsibilities associated with the office of the provost.

Benjamin Franklin recruited the first provost at the University of Pennsylvania in 1754, 14 years after the university’s founding. Many universities followed suit with provost appointments in the subsequent years. The deliberation of Cornell University trustees on the role of provost around 1931 was quite interesting, with intense discussions on the title and the role of the provost. The account of these deliberations at Cornell reads as follows (History of Cornell’s Provosts, n.d.): “The post of provost was created, because the President, overburdened with the routine of administration, needed an executive officer with the power to decide matters on secondary importance….” However, in 1943, the Cornell Board of Trustees briefly considered changing the title of the provost to vice president before ultimately decided against the move. According to the Board of Trustees proceedings of October 15, 1943, “The President and several other members of the Committee expressed themselves as opposed to the title of vice president …. It was held that one of the great virtues of the title of provost is its ambiguity. It is not a second-rate title; …. and this position needs a title that will cover that conception of its status.” Supporting the president in administration, but different from a typical vice president, were the two salient aspects of the deliberations on the role of the provost.

Most US universities began using the title of provost in the mid-1930s. Today many universities are using a combination of two titles: vice president for academic affairs and provost, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, or other similar combinations.

In August 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Vice President vs. Provost,” Ray Maghroori and Charles Powers (Maghroori & Powers, 2007) wrote about the two roles. The authors argue that a provost was expected to carry out both sets of duties, as vice president and provost, but the two roles entail distinctly different, sometimes conflicting responsibilities. Some of their writings are quoted below:

The traditional role of a vice president for academic affairs is to promote and maintain a distinctive academic vision. That means leading the intellectual community on the campus, playing the role of visionary, and, when necessary, defending lofty principles.

The vice president’s central responsibility is to make sure the institution clarifies and stays true to its mission.

By contrast, the provost’s traditional role is to make sure that administrative and support operations run as they need to on a daily basis. The provost monitors those processes, resolves personnel matters, balances budgets, arbitrates demands for facilities, … Success requires that the provost operate more as a pragmatic manager than a prophetic visionary.

According to the authors, to be effective in the role “means developing the instinct to know when to put on which hat.”

The vice president for academic affairs and provost has two sets of responsibilities: leading the academic enterprise in pursuing academic excellence as guided by a strategic vision and supporting the president in managing the university. While the two roles may entail different responsibilities, my leadership experience at UGA and the University of Michigan would illustrate the complementary and integrative nature of leadership and management.

3 Role of Provost at the University of Georgia

UGA has a well-defined organizational structure with the provost also serving as the senior vice president for academic affairs. It is the responsibility of the individual holding the office to always maintain focus on the university’s mission by advancing excellence in teaching, research, and service while monitoring operations, managing academic personnel, and continuously improving the academic enterprise.

The responsibilities of the provost at the University of Georgia are quite comprehensive. The provost oversees instruction, research, public service and outreach, and information technology. The vice presidents of these four areas, the deans of UGA’s 18 schools and colleges, and the campus dean of the UGA/Augusta University Medical Partnership report to the provost. The vice provost for academic affairs, the vice provost for diversity and inclusion and strategic university initiatives, and the vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School also report to the provost, as do the associate provosts for faculty affairs, global engagement, libraries, and academic fiscal affairs. The UGA Arts Council, Performing Arts Center, and the Georgia Museum of Art report to the provost through the vice provost for academic affairs.

An organization chart of the UGA Office of the Provost is provided below.

• 1. Advancing Excellence with Strategic Initiatives

My first task as provost was to assemble a leadership team. Among the new hires, I appointed a new vice provost for academic affairs and a new chief of staff from within the institution. Being new to the university, I needed experienced and respected leaders who could guide me in my journey, at least initially. I spent a significant amount of time on campus engagement, learning about the aspirations of the faculty and academic leadership and gaining a better understanding of the culture of scholarship. First, I joined the University’s New Faculty Tour at the beginning of August, traveling through 43 counties to learn about Georgia communities and industries, as well as UGA’s engagement with the citizens across the state. Starting in September 2019, I attended faculty meetings across campus, toured academic buildings and research laboratories, held informal “Coffee and Connection” networking opportunities for faculty and staff, hosted lunches with distinguished professors, and offered office hours for undergraduate and graduate students. These and other engagement activities reinforced what I had learned throughout the process of my candidacy and interviews: UGA possesses an outstanding undergraduate learning environment and administers an exemplary public service and outreach program. The university enjoys strong support from the State of Georgia and its citizens.

To identify new initiatives in education and research, I assembled a Provost’s Task Force on Academic Excellence to help guide me in the identification of areas for strategic investment. When I charged the Task Force, I asked for recommendations for strategic, focused investment in areas of strength while leveraging emerging opportunities and cultivating interdisciplinary collaborations. Based on metrics that included UGA’s existing expertise, external grant funding, scholarly metrics, and impact, the Task Force identified key research strengths such as precision agriculture, life/biomedical sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and environmental sciences. The Task Force also identified potential future strategic opportunities that aligned with anticipated global challenges and new or enhanced external funding programs and UGA’s mission. These opportunities included security (including topics related to defense, cyber, food, and supply chain security challenges) and addressing rural concerns.

The university has taken several steps to implement many of the recommendations. These include the establishment of the UGA Institute in Integrative Precision Agriculture, the University of Georgia Research Institute and membership in the Battelle Savannah River Alliance with the US Department of Energy, the Johnny Isakson Center for Neurological Diseases, and an annual Rural Engagement Workshop series and seed funding program to support teams of faculty in research on topics relevant to rural Georgia.

In addition, the work of the Task Force has guided the Presidential Interdisciplinary Faculty Hiring Initiative for 3 years. In 2021, UGA launched an ambitious initiative to recruit 50 faculty members with expertise in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to address some of society’s most urgent challenges. This hiring initiative builds on the expertise of our existing faculty and leverages our strength as a comprehensive research institution with a land- and sea-grant mission of service. Rather than being housed exclusively in a single department, the majority of UGA’s newly recruited faculty will focus on the fusion of data science and AI in cross-cutting areas such as infectious diseases, integrative precision agriculture, ethics, cybersecurity, resilient communities, and the environment. The hiring initiative was expanded in the fall of 2022 by adding 20 positions in data science and AI for teaching and learning and computational social sciences. These hires are organized into 10 clusters, and several of these clusters have the potential to evolve into research centers. Of the 70 positions, 35 are funded centrally and the other 35 are matching positions provided by academic units.

This cluster hiring initiative is the most aggressive and collaborative in UGA history. The hires are based on campus-wide competition, and faculty across different units collaborated on the proposals. Deans of the schools and colleges provided the matching positions to expand the scale and scope of the Presidential Faculty Hiring Initiative. For example, in dynamics of infectious diseases, faculty from the Odum School of Ecology, the College of Public Health, the College of Engineering, and the Department of Statistics worked together to develop a cluster proposal for a total of eight positions.

UGA was also successful in recruiting several Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholars whose research has been well funded and recognized nationally and internationally. Once at UGA, these exceptional scholars have served as catalysts in expanding research in their respective areas.

UGA research continues to grow at a significant pace, as evidenced by a 10% increase in research expenditures from the fiscal year (FY) 2021 to 2022. For the first time in FY22, the university’s research and development spending surpassed half a billion dollars (US$545.6 million).

• 2. Enhancing Graduate Education

With a growing and vibrant research enterprise, the need for graduate students has been increasing at UGA. In addition, many disciplines are seeing the master’s degree as an entry-level degree for professional practice. With ever-changing technologies, there is also a growing need for graduates who entered the professional practice to return to college to update their knowledge through advanced education with either a master’s degree or a professional certificate. Given these dynamics, the Provost’s Task Force took on additional deliberations and developed several recommendations for improving graduate education at the University of Georgia.

The Task Force recommendations focused on four main themes: (1) elevate/prioritize the graduate education enterprise; (2) enhance the national and international reputation of UGA graduate programs; (3) increase the quantity and quality of graduate students at UGA; and (4) enhance the integration of UGA’s graduate education and research/scholarly activity enterprises to increase institutional productivity.

As a first step toward enhancing UGA’s graduate programs, I elevated the dean of the Graduate School to a vice provost. The new vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School serves as a thought leader on campus to advance excellence in graduate education and to ensure that critical issues about graduate education are represented at the highest levels of the university. This newly elevated position provides leadership in every facet of graduate education and helps execute other recommendations such as fostering a culture of excellence in graduate mentoring, increasing external fellowships and awards received by graduate students, increasing the quantity and quality of incoming graduate students, enhancing UGA’s reputation for graduate education through external fellowships and more prestigious placements, and assisting in fundraising support for graduate students.

Since the appointment of Dr. Ron Walcott as vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School, UGA has experienced an increase in enrollment of graduate students, launched GradFIRST as a first-year seminar for new graduate students in research training, and increased financial support for graduate students through innovative funding mechanisms.

• 3. Ensuring University Operations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While my first several months as provost at the University of Georgia had been smooth sailing, a massive storm soon arrived: The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States at the end of February 2020, interrupting every facet of the university’s operations. UGA, in concert with all public institutions in the University System of Georgia, moved instruction online and paused many other activities. The decision was made during Spring Break, while many students were away from campus. Spring Break was extended by an additional week to allow students to return home if desired and to allow faculty to adapt their courses for online instruction for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester.

In the late spring, President Jere Morehead appointed several working groups to plan for a phased return to full operations at UGA in the fall of 2020. The working groups included instruction, research, public service and outreach, student life, enrollment management, budget and finance, athletics, and workplace safety.

The president also appointed a Medical Oversight Task Force that consisted of the deans of three health science colleges and the executive director of the University Health Center. The Medical Oversight Task Force was directed to develop protocols for COVID notification and isolation, to coordinate plans for contact tracing with the Georgia Department of Public Health, and to explore options for COVID testing. The president also appointed a Preventive Measures Advisory Board (PMAB), consisting of faculty and staff who were experts in infectious diseases, health communications, infrastructure, and maintenance. PMAB developed guidelines on preventive measures to ensure safety and reduce COVID transmissions.

Thanks to the foresight of the Medical Oversight Task Force, UGA quickly sought approval for Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) soon granted an emergency use authorization, allowing us to deploy the UGA Veterinary Diagnostic Lab for COVID testing. Asked by the president to work with the Medical Oversight Task Force to develop a budget for surveillance testing, I immediately realized that the budget was the least of our concerns. The greater challenges in developing surveillance testing included sourcing supplies for test kits, including swabs.

In searching for solutions to this dilemma, I learned that Augusta University had used 3D printed swabs for testing on a small scale in its hospital. I asked the provost at Augusta University to provide 200 3D printed swabs so that UGA could begin experiments and pilot testing. We also mobilized labs with 3D printing machines across the UGA campus to begin the fabrication of our own swabs. After several rounds of test experiments, the executive director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Lab and I were first in line to get tested on August 2, 2020, demonstrating the capability of the UGA faculty and staff in mobilizing our knowledge and infrastructure to address the challenge of the pandemic.

While initial pilot testing continued in the Veterinary Hospital, UGA’s Facilities Management Division worked to set up a testing site on the central campus to support large-scale testing before the Fall 2020 semester began. Throughout the next several semesters, I continued to work with the Medical Oversight Task Force to ensure budget and supplies for surveillance testing, which proved to be an extremely valuable safety measure for campus operations.

The Fall 2020 semester was carried out with social distancing and classes taught in three different modalities: in-person for classes with small enrollments to allow social distancing, hybrid classes to allow in-person and online rotation, and online for classes with high enrollment where social distancing was not possible.

Despite initial challenges with these different instruction modalities and the difficulty of managing attendance due to COVID-19 infection notifications and isolation, UGA continued its instruction throughout the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters and returned to full in-person instruction in Fall 2021.

Developing a surveillance testing system and supporting the university’s gradual return to normal operations required systematic planning and project management. There is no better example to illustrate the role of a provost in their management responsibilities to support university operations. I was glad to be able to use my systems engineering thinking in some aspects of project management.

4 My Journey in Academic Leadership

“十年磨一剑，百年筑一城”

Comprehensive research universities such as the University of Georgia and the University of Michigan are complex organizations. Leading such organizations requires comprehensive knowledge and understanding with the support of leadership teams to address the broad spectrum of responsibilities. This section provides details of my leadership roles at the University of Michigan and how they have laid the foundation for my progressively more important, expanding leadership responsibilities.

• 1. Program Leadership

My journey in academic leadership began in the fall of 1999 when I was appointed director of graduate programs in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. I was recommended for this role because I had been serving on the graduate program committee in the department and was active in graduate student mentoring and recruiting. I helped organize graduate student visits to campus and continued to engage with them after their visits with the hope of recruiting these top students to join the department as graduate students. Even though I had enlightened self-interest as I was hoping to recruit some of the best students to my own lab, my engagement activities were much broader as I was recruiting graduate students for the entire department.

I served in this role for 2 years and then took my one and only sabbatical leave in Europe, spending time at Chalmers University in Sweden and the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. My time at these universities provided an opportunity to learn about higher education in Europe and to establish friendships and collaborations with faculty in these universities that continue today.

After I returned from the sabbatical, I was asked to serve as director of the Program in Manufacturing (PIM), an interdisciplinary graduate program at the College of Engineering at Michigan. PIM offers the Master of Engineering and Doctoral of Engineering degrees in manufacturing. While serving in this role, PIM developed distance education programs for graduate students who were employees of various companies, including General Motors. Later, I was appointed executive director of Interdisciplinary Engineering, the umbrella organization that supports six interdisciplinary graduate programs in the College of Engineering, including programs in manufacturing, automotive engineering, and financial engineering.

• 2. Associate Deans in the College of Engineering

On July 1, 2006, Dr. David Munson began his tenure as dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. As in most new leadership tenures, Dean Munson was assembling a new leadership team that included an associate dean for undergraduate education, associate dean for research, and associate dean for graduate education. Based upon nomination from the faculty, I was invited to interview for the position of associate dean for research. I had a very active research program with a balanced funding portfolio and had experience working with industry and government agencies. I also served as a director or associate director for two research centers. I assume these credentials served as the basis for my nomination. During my interview with Dr. Munson, I indicated that I might not be the best candidate for either associate dean for research or associate dean for graduate education, but that if he were to combine the two associate dean jobs into one, I would be the best candidate for the combined position of associate dean for research and graduate education. In addition to running an active research program, I explained that I had broad experience in graduate education, having served as director of graduate programs in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and executive director of interdisciplinary graduate programs for the College. A few days later, I was offered the position of associate dean for research and graduate education effective from January 2007.

In the University of Michigan College of Engineering, the associate dean for research and graduate education plays a key role in supporting research, including research development, research infrastructure, cultivating large-scale team projects, and partnerships with industry. In terms of graduate education, I worked with the graduate program chairs across the college to expand the college graduate student recruitment effort. I also organized the annual graduate research symposium that served as a recruiting event for students from diverse backgrounds to visit Michigan Engineering to observe the current research and meet with faculty and students. I also partnered with the Rackham Graduate School to leverage graduate student support to incentivize large-scale research proposals that helped grow research in the college.

In 2019, I was appointed associate dean for academic affairs (ADAA) in the College of Engineering, the senior associate dean in the College. ADAA oversees faculty affairs, works with department chairs in operations, and partners with the dean on resource planning and allocation. In many ways, the ADAA has responsibilities similar to that of a provost except that these responsibilities are at the college level. Working with the department chairs and with the provost’s office on faculty affairs was the most fulfilling aspect of the ADAA role.

Institutional excellence in research and education rests on the scholarly and creative contributions of its talented faculty and staff and the intellectual quality, vitality, and passion of its students. During my service as ADAA, I had the pleasure of working with department chairs and Dean Munson in recruiting more than 50 faculty members to the College. I interviewed every candidate. By the time I left Michigan for UGA, many of the faculty members I helped recruit had become stars in their disciplines.

Michigan Engineering features strong faculty governance through an elected faculty Executive Committee. My experience working with the Executive Committee in all faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, and budget discussions gave me an appreciation of the role of faculty governance in enhancing institutional excellence.

As associate dean for academic affairs, I also had the opportunity to advance diversity goals as chair of the Dean’s Advisory Committee on Faculty Diversity. The committee developed recommendations designed to increase the number of women on the Michigan Engineering faculty. The committee also created a new faculty development program, “The Next Profs.” This annual workshop series invited senior PhD students and post-doctoral research fellows from underrepresented backgrounds to Michigan for 3 days of seminars and interactions. This program was very valuable in identifying candidates for future faculty hires. I saw firsthand how diversity enriches classroom instruction and experiential learning, where students learn from each other and from diverse faculty members. Research teams were also greatly strengthened with diverse team members who brought creativity and different perspectives.

• 3. Vice President for Research at Michigan

In October 2013, I got a call from the Office of the President. President Mary Sue Coleman was looking to appoint an interim vice president for research after the incumbent had announced that he would be stepping down from the role. I was quite honored to be considered.

While I had worked with the President’s office in various ways when I served in the associate dean roles, it was the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership from 2011 through 2014 that gave me an opportunity to work closely with President Coleman. The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership was a White House initiative under President Obama, organized to develop recommendations on manufacturing technologies, shared infrastructure, education, and policies to strengthen advanced manufacturing in the United States. While President Coleman served on the Executive Committee of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, I served as a member of the Operations Committee. I advised President Coleman on the University of Michigan research and education programs in manufacturing, provided inputs on partnership deliberations and recommendations, and traveled with her to the White House several times. Hence, President Coleman had opportunities to observe me work in various settings.

The vice president for research serves as the senior research officer and leads the Office of Research with a mission to catalyze, support, and safeguard research and scholarship across the University of Michigan. Advancing research, cultivating interdisciplinary collaboration, and ensuring integrity and compliance are the key priorities of the Vice President for Research.

• 3.1. Cultivating Interdisciplinary Research

The University of Michigan has an expansive research enterprise that spans the campuses of Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint. Annual research expenditures at the time totaled more than US$1.5 billion. Faculty in all disciplines were active in research and scholarship, but the major contributors to the volumes of research during my service were the Medical School, College of Engineering, Institute for Social Research, College of Literature, Arts and Sciences, and School of Public Health.

During my tenure as vice president, UM launched several large-scale interdisciplinary initiatives, including the Michigan Institute for Data Science, a US$100 million investment over 5 years. The investment included faculty hires, seed grants supporting data sciences in learning analytics, transportation, computational social sciences, and precision medicine. UM also launched Mcity, a public–private partnership for connected and automated transportation. Mcity was supported by the university, Michigan Department of Transportation, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and more than 40 companies. The partnership provided faculty and students with not just financial resources but also societally relevant problems for research, innovation, and testing.

• 3.2. Ensure Research Integrity and Compliance

As Vice President for Research, I provided management and oversight to ensure research integrity and compliance, including responsible conduct of research and scholarship, conflict of interest, human subject research, animal care and use program, research security, international engagement, and export controls. One of the major challenges I encountered was the animal care and use program. Due to the decentralized nature of the university budget and management, animal research had also become decentralized. This led to inconsistent messaging and staff training and a lack of central resources to support the animal care and use program. In turn, this led to some deficiencies in infrastructure and institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) oversight challenges with accreditation review. With support from the president and provost, I led a 2-year effort to restructure the campus-wide animal care and use program. These changes included the recruitment of an associate vice president for research who also served as the university’s attending veterinarian and an assistant vice president for animal resources, the centralization of all animal resources staff across campus, and greatly enhanced communications. The restructuring promoted a consistent set of policies and practices across the three campuses and led to subsequent successful accreditation reviews.

These leadership roles at the University of Michigan provided me with an opportunity to gain experience in faculty affairs, graduate education, research, budget, and resources. They helped me build a strong and broad foundation for my role as provost at UGA, which has wide-ranging responsibilities in instruction, research, public service and outreach, and information technologies.

5 Lessons Learned

Through my leadership experience serving in different administrative roles at two large public research universities, I have gained insights into the complexity and operations of higher education institutions.

• 1. Leading versus Managing: While Maghroori and Powers (Maghroori & Powers, 2007) discussed the difference between the two roles of a vice president for academic affairs versus a provost, and the need to be able to wear the right hat at the right time, my own experience would indicate the complementary and integrative nature of leadership and management. Leadership means articulating a compelling vision for the institution that galvanizes the support of the leadership team and faculty and inspires them to pursue strategic goals. Effective management means minimizing interventions so that the organization can focus on the institutional mission and strategic vision. Both leadership and management are critical to academic excellence and success in fulfilling a university’s mission.

• 2. Relentless Focus: In each leadership role, one must focus on the mission of the office. For example, the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at UGA have overall responsibility for the institution’s academic excellence including instruction, research, and public service. Pursuing strategic goals in each area is necessary for a successful leadership tenure. The academic mission guides the strategic initiatives and investment and the day-to-day operations. For a vice president of research or chief research officer, growing research, cultivating interdisciplinary collaborations, and ensuring integrity and compliance are the essential missions. A new leader must define these objectives and create a strategic vision through discussions with the faculty and other leaders. Ambitious, yet achievable, goals for the office can then be set.

• 3. Importance of Leadership Team: The institutional vision needs to be supported with common goals. The provost cannot do everything alone and needs a strong and diverse team of academic leaders who bring wide-ranging experiences and perspectives to the table. I have been fortunate to collaborate with an outstanding team of leaders, vice presidents, vice provosts, associate provosts, and deans who work closely together to advance academic excellence at the University of Georgia.

• 4. Importance of People Skills and Emotional Intelligence: Serving the institution and supporting faculty and students in their pursuit of excellence lies at the very foundation of academic leadership. Emotional intelligence is vital when working with people. When the formal search for the vice president for research began, the University of Michigan president articulated several desired personal and professional characteristics for the new vice president, including:

  • A high degree of intellectual curiosity, extending to disciplines beyond one’s own

  • Absolute integrity

  • Sense of humor

  • Energy

  • Altruism—taking joy in bringing value to others’ work

  • High respect for colleagues

  • Charisma, the ability to sell ideas, and

  • Being incisive and decisive

Many of these characteristics are what I consider elements of emotional intelligence that can serve one well when in leadership positions. Developing these characteristics and practicing them regularly will support leadership and management.

As an institution of learning, our mission is all about people: creating the next generation of leaders, innovators, and citizens. However, it is the faculty who carry out the teaching and create the new knowledge, and it is the staff who will make the university run efficiently. As a provost, hiring the best faculty and staff and supporting them with resources lies at the very center of advancing academic excellence in a top institution.