Provost (education) - History

History

The first use of the title provost in American and Canadian higher education is unclear. At the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, the title provost dates to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, respectively. At the University of Pennsylvania, the administrative head of the university was titled provost until the 1930s, when the Board of Trustees created a separate office of president and re-designated the provost as chief academic officer and subordinate to the new presidency. At Columbia University, the Board of Trustees established the office of provost in 1811, only to abolish it five years later. The Trustees and the president of the university re-established the office of provost in 1912. Although the precise title of the office has changed over time, the responsibility as Columbia's chief academic officer has remained constant.

Other North American universities and colleges created provostships during and after World War II when dramatic increases in undergraduate enrollments (due to the G.I. Bill) and the increased complexity of higher education administration, led many chief executive officers to adopt a more corporate governing structure. By the 1960s, most of the other Ivy League institutions (Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and Brown) had provosts (or equivalents), as did other private research universities such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, Rice University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Emory University, Wake Forest University and Duke University.

At Harvard University, the office of provost has had two distinct incarnations. The office's first incarnation was during World War II and the immediate postwar era. James Bryant Conant, the president of the university from 1933 to 1953, asked the Harvard Corporation (the more senior of the two governing boards) to create the office of provost in October 1945, at time when he (Conant) spent a great deal of time in Washington, D.C. as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Conant appointed historian Paul Herman Buck, the dean of the Faculty of Arts of Sciences (FAS), to concurrently serve as provost. (The original legislation required that the provost be concurrently dean of FAS.) As provost and dean, Buck had oversight of FAS (which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Extension School, the Summer School, and what is now called the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) and its affiliated laboratories, research centres, and museums. However, he had no authority over Harvard's professional schools (at that time, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Faculty of Medicine, the School of Public Health, and the Graduate Schools of Business Administration, Design, Education, and Public Administration). The provost's office was eliminated when Conant retired from Harvard's presidency in 1953. During the presidencies of Nathan Marsh Pusey (1953–1971) and Derek C. Bok (1971–1993), the deans of Harvard's nine faculties reported directly to the president, with the dean of FAS being primus inter pares. The second incarnation began in 1993, when then-Harvard President Neil Rudenstine asked the Corporation to recreate the provostship as a second university-wide academic officer other than the president. A section of Harvard's 1997 Re-accreditation Report for the New England Commission of Colleges and Schools reads:

"The Provost at Harvard acts as an extension of the President. He is the second academic officer, after the President, having purview of the entire University. The Provost has special responsibility for fostering intellectual interactions across the University, including the five Interfaculty Initiatives (environment, ethics and the professions, schooling and children, mind/brain/behavior, and health policy). The Provost also acts to help improve the quality and efficiency of central services organized at Harvard under the aegis of the Vice Presidents."