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In the week leading up to the announcement that I would be stepping down as Provost after nearly seven years, I reached out in advance to specific persons with whom I have worked most closely. In addition to Cabinet, my direct reports, and the staff in the Provost’s Office, two faculty in particular were on that list, Murli Natrajan and Sue Tardi. In the case of Murli, for three of my nearly seven years, he has been the chair of the Faculty Senate. As a matter of regular routine, we have gathered at least monthly for tea at Einstein’s to engage important academic matters ranging from policy issues, to programs in the approval or update pipeline, to the UCC, to a myriad of other topics of shared importance. With respect to Sue, she has been the president of the AFT for all of my time here and together we’ve navigated many challenging issues with impact on faculty.
In my conversation with Sue, we reflected on the AFT-sponsored workshops for faculty on retention and tenure, promotion, range adjustment, sabbaticals, and ART. Those sessions have been one of the most gratifying activities for me, in part for the trust built with the Union to be a co-facilitator with them, but also because for me, reading portfolios is an aspect of the job that is most enjoyable—seeing the wide range of accomplishments across teaching, scholarly, and service domains. Although it is enormously time-consuming, reading how faculty have deployed their talents, and at different points in their career, simply put, reinforces what makes being a college professor such a special calling.
What places this aspect of the provost role at or near the top of what I have loved most, however, are conversations with faculty who accepted my routine invitation to talk about their application in a circumstance where they did not receive the desired outcome. No one did this for me across my faculty career, and I was determined to do what I could to help others be successful in theirs. Such conversations were invariably deep and reflective, and required as much active listening on my part as offering counsel. But by the end of every meeting, I’ve sensed an unusual connection between the two of us that transcended positional differences, and we’ve both benefited from it. I have also seen over time in subsequent portfolios and review processes how it has benefited them or will benefit them going forward. Thank you all for these conversations; you know who you are, and I look forward to seeing you grow and flourish in your careers.
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