May 12, 2005
Second provost candidate visits campus
Outreach, partnership and communication were the topics Kristina Johnson kept coming back to during a forum for the second of the provost candidates to visit the campus. Johnson, professor of electrical engineering and dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, made only brief remarks before opening the floor to questions from the audience.
Quoting a Spanish educator from the 1930s, she cited four purposes for the research university: To pass on the cultural system, to provide for the active discovery of knowledge, to prepare professionals to serve society and to provide leaders for the next generation. Johnson said these things remain challenges for the modern university and call for a strategic allocation of resources to keep them going. Calling faculty and students the heart of the university, she emphasized the need for good faculty salaries and good access for students.
Echoing the previous candidate, Susan Prager, Johnson mentioned the interdisciplinary strength of the UW and said it should be embedded in the curriculum at all levels. Asked to elaborate, she jokingly said that President Mark Emmert had told her all incoming administrators had to take the Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm.”
“Administrators have to make sure they don’t get in the way of interdisciplinary efforts,” Johnson said. She described a project she’d been involved in at Duke — a recently completed building that is dedicated to interdisciplinary efforts in engineering, medicine and applied science.
“When departments come together in an effort like that, it’s like a marriage,” Johnson said. “Each party has to give more than 100 percent.”
She said the most important part of that building was the café, where people come together and mingle. “Administrators have to create opportunities for units to interact,” she said. “It’s a carrot approach, not a stick.”
Johnson also talked more specifically about a broader approach to the curriculum. She said in engineering, there has been a 40 percent attrition rate while students take required introductory courses, and that it would be more useful to hook them early on learning what they need to know to be successful. She gave an example of all the students at Duke receiving iPods. They were asked to hook up the iPods to computers and download songs. This led to learning how to do a lot of things as they solved the problems involved in storing the large amounts of music.
When questioners asked how Johnson, who comes from a private institution, would deal with the financial constraints of a public institution, she reminded them that she had spent 14 years at the University of Colorado before going to Duke and that during her time there, state funding had eroded.
“We have to look for public/private/governmental partnerships,” she said. “And we have to let the world know what we’re doing. We have to create and communicate the kind of buzz that will get noticed.”
Asked about diversity, Johnson said it was important to do outreach to find out what a particular group wants and try to respond to that. She gave the example of women in engineering, who have been shown to stay in the field if they can find a way to align it to the common good.
One questioner wanted to know how Johnson, as someone from a field that gets a lot of funding from government and industry, would relate to fields where this kind of support is not as available.
“Obviously I would need to reach out even more to other fields and understand what they need to succeed,” she said. “I think facilities are very important, and I’d try to make sure that those fields had adequate facilities.”
Johnson also spoke of joint efforts, such as a recent hire in the Duke engineering school whose husband is a hip hop musician and was asked to teach in the music school.
Regarding the three-campus system, Johnson said UW Bothell and UW Tacoma could help the University meet the challenge of the many students expected by 2008, and that the three campuses could leverage resources by creating programs in which students do part of their work on one campus and part on another.
Johnson said she was interested in the UW job because it is an opportunity to impact a university on a broader level.
“I see the job of provost as being an enabler,” she said. “The goal is to serve. I used to say I would never become an administrator, but I’ve learned the power of bringing people together. Now I really see it as a calling.”
The third scheduled provost candidate, Phyllis Wise, distinguished professor of neurobiology and dean f the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis, visited the campus yesterday.
The three candidates invited to campus came from a list of 59 who had expressed interest and 11 who had been interviewed off campus, according to Search Committee Chair Tom Daniel. Other candidates may still be invited to visit. The search committee hopes to have a new provost in place by fall quarter.
To read the story about the provost candidate Susan Prager, go to http://admin.urel.washington.edu/uweek/archives/issue/uweek_story_small.asp?id=2714
