Role Of University Provost

The provost is the Chief Academic Officer. The Provost is responsible for working with the President and shaping the academic strategy of the university. At the same time, if you want to look at it, if our business is education, one way to explain it to the lay community is that the Provost is the Chief Operating Officer for the education initiative. And so, I work with the Deans and the Deans report to the Provost Office. And the Provost works with the Deans to develop academic strategy, to work on the resource requirements, to make sure things get done sometimes, particularly at a place like SMU; we require collaboration across the schools. If we have, for example, there could be a major in Information Systems with a minor in Marketing, and that requires collaboration within schools. So it's not that the Deans can do that independently. So we need a mechanism by which we can facilitate that and that's another role that the Provost plays to help the schools achieve what they would like to achieve. So by and large, think of it as a Chief Academic Officer and a Chief Operating Officer.