About the Webconference
Hitting the Ground Running: Surviving and Thriving in Your First Two Years as Provost
New provosts face a daunting set of challenges, from prioritizing hundreds of complicated issues and engaging diverse stakeholders with conflicting views, to understanding how a changing higher education landscape will affect their institution over the long term while responding to the inevitable daily emergencies.
The most important priority for a new provost is to develop a comprehensive diagnosis of their institution’s greatest challenges and to find a way to capitalize on its existing and emerging strengths. But how to do this when you lack both the omniscience to understand how a thousand external changes might impact your institution and the omnipotence to compel your campus to adapt accordingly.
This 60-minute webconference will outline how new, acting, and interim provosts can quickly prioritize opportunities and enlist the entire community to make a real impact on their campuses.
Assessing the impact of external trends
Changing regional demographics, declining public support for higher education, new competitive dynamics, evolving student expectations, and new technologies are just a few of the dozens of factors that could affect your institution. But will their impact be positive or negative? How large with the impact be, and how quickly will your institution face it? A provost cannot be an expert on every trend, but he or she must be able to ask the right questions of the right experts and to focus the campus on the most important issues.
Understanding the levers of change
Provosts cannot make decisions alone, nor can they force the campus to go along with their preferred course of action. The power that provosts wield lies in their ability to build consensus and to align incentives around common goals. Strategic investments, new budget models, and better performance data may take time to bear fruit, but they are the only way to create lasting change.
Moving the needle on student success
Nearly every provost will tell you that student success is their top issue, whether their concern is retention and graduation rates, shortening time to degree, job placement, or reducing the achievement gap (or all of the above). After decades of work and billions of dollars in investment, precious little progress has been made nationally. How can you prioritize the top opportunities for your institution and map out achievable goals for your first two years? And how can you as provost enable improvements that may require every person on campus to change in some way?
While there is no magic nostrum that will make a provost’s job easy, there are demonstrated best practices that can help you avoid making mistakes and ensure that your efforts are targeted at the most important areas.