Provost Blog

 I have read a couple books recently that I would recommend. The first is The Great Upheaval - Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future by Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and the second is The College Stress Test by Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).  It is best to read The Great Upheaval first, followed by The College Stress Test (I read them in the reverse order) because The Great Upheaval looks at higher education in North America (but mostly focused on the U.S.) historically and contemporaneously in making the case that great change is not only happening but accelerating. The College Stress Test provides a mechanism by which institutions can test their viability amidst current challenges. Like dozens and dozens of books published on higher education over the last decade or two, The Great Upheaval predicts great change, and argues that the vast majorit...

I spent a decent part of the summer thinking about change. I'm sure we all did to some degree. After all, the University has been through a lot of change in the last year. But, much of my thoughts were on future change rather than changes we have been through. As President Kelly has communicated, the next big initiative for Christopher Newport University is to conduct a strategic plan and to develop the strategic compass to guide our future change. The idea of doing a strategic plan motivates me because the idea of strategizing about the ways to meet our current challenges and to chart a course for the future is exciting and fundamentally important. I hope we all take it seriously and engage meaningfully. In my mind, a strategic planning process could be most simply characterized as challenging current assumptions, thereby encouraging thinking about change, and developing some sense of what that change could look like. Challenging current assumptions does not ipso facto mean everyt...

In the cycle of the academic calendar, endings are a time of both reflection and looking ahead to new beginnings. That is true for all of us on campus, but the endings and beginnings are more pronounced for faculty as the months of summer look markedly different from the months of the semesters. I've come to better appreciate the more subtle endings and beginnings cycle for academic administrators as well. I was out on a run the other day and found myself thinking about last August, when the academic year started. Then, I was a bundle of anxiety about change, but also full of hope for the year ahead. I believed then, and I still do now, that our institutional foundations were strong enough to not just weather but thrive in the changes ahead. I was keenly aware that our academic leadership team needed to steer a steady course, and confident that we would do just that. While I was certainly curious to see what this new season for Christopher Newport would bring, I was also excited to...

We are nearing the end of what I have come to refer to as Recommendation Letter Season, which in my experience typically begins some time in mid-November and tapers off by late March (just in time for March Madness). Recommendation Letter Season kicks off with requests from students, and over the years I've experienced variations on three kinds of letter requestors. One kind is the last minute requestor who doesn't really have a fully conceived idea about what they want to do or how they want to do it, but they know it will involve Harvard, Yale, or Oxford (or insert whatever school is essentially out of reach for them). Oftentimes this student has decent grades, but is aiming too high and because they are so overextended they are doing things very last minute. Another kind is the student who did not do particularly well in the class (or classes) they took from you and shows up in your inbox or at your office door one day asking you for a letter, seemingly oblivious to how thei...

 I had the opportunity over break to make some headway on the ever-growing pile of books to read. One in particular, about sustained excellence in higher education, really got me thinking about our challenges and opportunities. The book is Becoming Great Universities - Small Steps for Sustained Excellence by Richard J. Light and Allison Jegla (Princeton University Press, 2022). Light and Jegla's study focuses on what they describe as ten core challenges that most colleges and universities face. They admit, there are clearly many more than ten challenges faced by colleges and universities today. These are common challenges as identified by Light through a series of several hundred interviews. In discussing each, they offer examples of institutions that have successfully addressed them, as well as some cautionary tales of failure. While I think in one way or another Christopher Newport faces all ten of the challenges that Light and Jegla focus on in their book, as I consider our nea...

I had one of my core advisees in the office last week for an impromptu meeting. It was our seventh meeting of the semester, third impromptu meeting. The main reason for this unplanned meeting: time management. Like many first-semester students, this one was trying to manage an ambitious course schedule that was academically challenging, a robust campus and social life, and sleep-management issues. The result was a lot of stress. I realized very quickly that with this student I was also playing a two-part role. One part was as the traditional core advisor where I gave advice and guidance on a whole host of things from academics and class schedules to parking and dinning (and everything in between). The other part was as an arbiter between the student and the parent(s), where the parent(s) had offered some kind of advice and the student wanted a second opinion. I think things are going to be fine with the student, but after our last meeting I found myself thinking about my own time manag...