The Provost Paradox

I was surprised to find myself explaining this phenomenon to multiple people over the past few months, so I'm putting it down here for dissemination and comment. Readers will wonder whether this is a specific reaction to something at Brown; it's not, and out provosts largely seem to be sound eggs.

There's a problem that plagues academic hiring. I'm sure it affects corporate hiring too, though there, the obsession with growth may mean this is considered a feature, not a bug. Still, I trust some B-school professor has given the problem a catchy enough title to write a book around it; I just haven't found it yet.

Provosts are chief academic officers of universities. Their responsibilities range from overseeing academic programs to supervising research activities, and they often control budgets and personnel to both enforce and exhort. At many universities, the president is a fund-raising, public-relations machine, while the provost keeps the academic and research programs running.

The problem is, many provosts are really just presidents-in-waiting. Positions like deanship and provosthood are ideal stepping-stones to presidencies elsewhere, so some provosts—especially those without a deep institutional attachment—are burnishing their vita waiting for the right presidential opening.

As an academic, one administrative attribute you value tremendously is stability. Innovation is terrific (and essential: the very lifeblood of quality academia) when it's driven bottom-up, for all the usual reasons that demand-driven, bottom-up activity works better than policy-driven, top-down decision-making. In some instances, of course, top-down decisions are essential, most crucially when an institution is stuck in a rut and needs shaking-up. In most other circumstances, things get iffy.

The problem is, steady-as-she-goes doesn't cut it in the job market. When you apply for that plum presidency, a cover letter that says, “Was provost for eight years; maintained quality of academic programs, sustained funding levels, ensured no drop in already-high student-satisfaction ratings” just doesn't cut it. That you obtained something in good shape and sustain that level of quality is simply not regarded as sufficient achievement, never mind that it's a tremendously difficult thing to do (indeed, much harder than sprinkling new works about campus).

The problem, I believe, has everything to do with the ubiquitous press release. A statement that says “We hired Ludwig Knickerbocker, who in eight years at Beta State U. didn't screw up anything” is synonymous with ol' Ludwig not being a go-getter; there's no tiger in his tank. Where is the pride in proclaiming such a person as your new president? What alumnus who hasn't donated before is going to start doing so now? Compare that with “created the world's first Institute for Hypodermic Psychoceramics” and you've got the alumni right where you want them.

Of course, nobody really asks Beta State what they think of the Institute. Oh, sure, there are some disgruntled faculty, but that phrase is redundant, and they're probably just upset that they weren't part of the institute's gravy train. The folks on the gravy train are, of course, ecstatic. What are the institute's long-term prospects? What did the creation plan say about evaluation? Were there any metrics? How does it score today? And do those metric make sense? You almost never see that in the press releases.

Of courae, ask any faculty member about the proliferation of Institutes and Programs, and they will respond with weary cynicism. That's because they know that long after the creator has burnished their vita and moved on, the institution will be left holding the bag (and given how conservative academia is, the new entity will never actually close, but rather will slither along in the undergrowth). And yet when they hire someone else's provost to be their president, they propagate the very culture that they, often rightly, deplore.

Out of Africa

About a year and half ago, a good friend (name hidden to protect the guilty) bought me an extremely generous gift: a pair of MBT running shoes, which cost the grand sum of about 150 GBP, a sum I'm entirely unworthy of.

What kind of shoe costs that much? One that comes with its own DVD, of course. MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology, and you can immediately see it all come together, the confluence of technology (Technology), its opposite (Barefoot), and its appropriately politically correct second-cousin twice-removed (Masai). MBT shoes are characterized by a curved sole—think the shape of the Nike swoosh— that make the very notion of standing stil a bit of a balancing act. The theory is immediately obvious: the sole's shape mirrors the manner in which you're supposed to place, roll and lift your feet while running, so the shoes will improve your running motion and quite likely result in less stress on the knees. And so forth: there are details about the lace fasteners, and so on, but these are all second-order attributes.

I haven't, I'm afraid, had a chance to test any of these theories. Because my friend bought me the shoes from some sort of exercise center-cum-spa in London, to which I haven't been able to return, I was entirely at the mercy of the extraordinarily unqualified fitting, ahem, sales agent, who failed to account for either the width of my feet (wider than normal) or the thickness of socks. Result: the shoes don't fit me, and I've only used them about six times, usually with painful consequences.

Before leaving for Banff in May, I decided to go for a quick run in the morning. For reasons not worth elaborating, I decided to do the run in the MBTs, and without socks. (The latter is less daft than it sounds once you accept the initial premise, seeing as that's the only way I can fit my feet into the shoes.)

I was doing quite well for the first several minutes until I began to feel a slight itch in the rear of my right foot. After a while it got rather irritating, as if a small, sharp stone had gotten wedged. Squriming my foot didn't seem to move the stone at all so, at the end of a mile, I stopped to investigate. A goodly surface, about the size of an American quarter, had lost its epidermis and was raw, pink, bleeding flesh.

There was only one natural course of action. I took off the shoes, in the best puss-in-boots fashion put one on each hand, and proceeded to run the mile back home...barefoot. Oh, the irony.

For anyone tempted to smack down several Dead Presidents for MBTs, don't let this tale dissuade you. I'm sure they have wonderful reasons for making the backs of the heels chafe. They certainly can't be blamed for selling their wares prominently through incompetent outlets. The DVD alone may be worth the price. But I must warn you about one more unexpected side-effect of wearing MBTs.

Two winters ago we visited my wife's family in Williamsburg, Virginia. Kathi, her sister Jodi, and I went for a run through the historical area, and ended up in the cheese shop(pe?). As we traversed the store I heard a rather delighted squeal from behind, in stereo. I turned to find a mother-daughter pair, looking for all the world like they listed a spa as their home address, staring in delight at my legs. My ego deflated slightly when I realized they were actually staring at the bottom of my legs. We made eye-contact and they proceeded, mother taking the lead, “Ohmygawd! Where did you get those from?” After several rounds of exchange in which they revealed the celebrity status of MBT trainers at their spa, one of the distaff pair finally let it drop: “We've nevah seen those on a man before!”

Caveat emptor.

I Know I Knew a Knee

In late 2005 I started to take up running. After two winters on a bike trainer in the basement, I was jealous of people who could actually do outdoor things in the winter—in shorts! Running is relatively convenient compared with cycling, especially where I live, so when spring arrived my feet stayed firmly planted on the ground, instead of clipping into pedals. And thus, what began as a winter substitute turned into cross-training and then slowly morphed into something I nearly admitted to liking. (The admission comes hard in part because having been asthmatic into my teens, running is truly harsh on me.) The day before we left for Edinburgh in November 2006, I ran my first sub-7-minute mile.

By spring 2007, the entire length of my left leg felt about twice as old as the rest of me. I had some persistent pain in that foot; then along the thigh; and finally the knee got so bad I couldn't sit with my knee bent for more than fifteen minutes. In restaurants, I had to find a table where I could stretch out my leg, as if fractured and in a cast. I was very close to going in to a doctor, and had begun steeling myself for the inevitable knee surgery.

As an experiment, starting in the beginning of May, I decided to give up running cold turkey and focus solely on cycling. At first all those old pains persisted, and manifested themselves on the bike. But then, about 500 miles later, I noticed that they were...completely gone. My left leg feels as good as my right, both feel excellent, and I write this message having just spent four continuous hours almost motionless on a plane, knees bent, without the slightest trace of pain.

It's well-known that running is usually harder on the knees than cycling (though a badly-configured bicycle can be just as bad or worse). I'm also lazy about warming-up and the like; clearly, people run marathons on end without anything like the problems my feeble efforts engendered. But it still amazes me that cycling can not only be so much less bodily stress, but that it can have helped effectively cure my knee. Maybe I can sink the cost of that surgery into a new bike instead!

If Your Name is Michaels, My Name is D78#*xj

Kathi is decorating her office with large prints of some photographs from our recent trips. We were recently at a craft (chain) store named Michaels to buy the frame materials, and one of the photographs required a custom order. The young man at the frame department took our order, had us pay for it, and asked us to fill in our contact information.

I wasn't firing on all cylinders that afternoon, but it still struck me as odd that they wanted details like a street address. What were they going to do—mail a 24x36 border to our house? Besides, we had already pre-paid for the item, so it seemed it would be our problem to take delivery, not theirs. (Indeed, the form Kathi was filling had some legalese about how Michaels would hold the ordered item for only sixty days or so, further confirming that now that they had our money, it was now our problem, not theirs.)

While filling, Kathi noticed that she was signing an extremely generous waiver regarding what they could do with the information. She asked the frame clerk whether she could avoid providing all this information. He said he wasn't sure. Meanwhile, I noticed that the text included an express option for restricting distribution of the data. I asked how we could invoke that option. He wasn't sure about that either, but hesitantly asked whether we'd like to speak with a manager. He was slightly taken aback by the vigor with which I said yes.

The manager arrived. We explained the situation. She was two parts surprise that anyone would care (doesn't everyone love catalogs full of kitchy “crafts projects”?) and one part flummoxed. She didn't seem to entirely understand what we wanted. I pointed her to the line on the contract offering the opt-out (it wasn't an opt-in, natch). Her next two sentences would infuriate any privacy-conscious person: first, “I've never had anyone ask for that before” followed (much worse) by, “I have no idea how to do that”. In other words, Michaels cares so little about this that not only do they have an opt-out rather than an opt-in, they haven't trained their staff—not even their managers—how to enact it.

Points, though, to the frame clerk. He thought for a moment and said, “Now that we've placed the order, how about if I go into the database and erase that data?” The manager looked even more confused, but having no good argument for anything at this point, she consented. Of course, it's impossible to tell whether that will have any effect; for all we know, the moment the order was placed, our address had been zipped out to twenty different purveyors of schmaltzy catalogs. Time will tell.

Slow-Motion Sports

American football is my canonical example of a slow-motion sport. By that I'm not referring to the long pauses between action (what George Will famously likened to committee meetings), and obviously not to the actual plays, in which numerous people with the speed of top sprinters charge in several different directions all at once. Rather, I'm referring to the fact that what you see is not what you necessarily get: before you can cheer for a touchdown, you have to check whether a flag was thrown on the 40-yard line because someone whom you've never heard of who had nothing to do with the play grabbed the jersey of someone else you've never heard of who also would have had nothing to do with the play—save for the jersey-grabbing, which has now nullified the play itself.

Every sport has or is acquiring slow-motion elements. Cricket and tennis now have action-replays that can make or nullify a decision. But these are invoked rarely, and when they are, the result is usually dramatic (in cricket, especially, the uses are sparing and important enough that the official replays are tenser than the play itself). And outside a small set of events there are no fouls or replays, letting stand what you saw as what happened.

Mind, I don't mean “slow-motion” as a pejorative. There is a certain kind of fan for whom that very indecision is part of the charm of the sport, and it leads to a kind of dramatic tension of its own. So be it. That isn't my point here.

What I did want to point out is that we've rapidly acquired a new slow-motion sport: cycling. It used to be that nothing matched the primal immediacy of a mountain stage: a small handful of the most talented riders struggling up an HC climb, attacking and dropping, standing and delivering. The pain was real because the context was real: you didn't need to refrain from delivering a glancing blow because you weren't sure of what flags were flying elsewhere on the field of play. You didn't need a photo finish: the difference in finishing times was in the order of minutes. For an aficionado, there are few more dramatic things in all of human activity.

That's still what happens on TV, but the outcomes have become entirely detached from the action. Who's dirty, who's clean? Who's going to have irregular blood or inhuman testosterone? From Hamilton to Landis to Basso to Petacchi to Vinokourov, what frustrates me most is not watching and wondering “Are they clean?” but rather wondering, “Should I be applauding?”. After all, tomorrow may say today didn't happen, or even next year may say this year didn't happen.

To me, then, the real tragedy is that what has gone out is not trust: that was never there. What has been lost, instead, is the immediacy, the directness, the decisiveness. Cycling has become a slow-motion sport—an ironic statement about an activity in which men and women climb impossibly steep pitches at improbably high speeds—where decisions are made and then unmade over what is, relative to the action itself, geological time. That, to me, is the truly incalculable loss. By the time we watched the finish of Stage 15 on a one-day delay, we'd already heard about Vino's (supposedly) failed dope test, so watching the play was surreal, and about half the comments by the commentators sounded cruelly ironic.

Meanwhile, though, I'll still be getting goose-pimples watching Alberto Con(ta)dor fly out of his saddle like—indeed, even better than—a certain Texan, and hope he won't go the way of all the other climbing prodigies of the past few years, from Iban Mayo to Alejandro Valverde to, perhaps the most dramatic of them all, Damiano Cunego, who rode like Marco Pantani on the way to his Giro win and has subsequently never demonstrated that same form (hmm...).