August 18, 2005
New provost learning fast, preparing for vision statement
Phyllis Wise says a university administrator is more like a member of a chamber group than the conductor of an orchestra. “An orchestra conductor gets to tell the musicians how the music is going to be played,” she said. “But with a chamber music group, it’s a constant conversation.”
Wise joined the UW conversation Aug. 1 as the first permanent provost since 2002, when Lee Huntsman left the post to become interim president. Since her arrival, Wise has been hurrying from meeting to meeting, getting a crash course in the University and its people.
“It’s been so exciting,” she said of her first weeks on the job. “I actually love this part — learning the landscape, learning the culture of a new place.”
Wise expects the intense learning phase to go on for two to three months, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be taking any action. “I feel some urgency here because I think with the president coming last year and with the anticipation of a more permanent provost that there are expectations that are just huge,” she said.
One of the first things on her agenda is beginning the process of formulating a vision statement for the University. Wise says she believes there is a “yearning” for such a statement to guide the University’s activities over the next 10 years, and that she will be spending a lot of her time gathering input so that the statement can be embraced by everyone.
Key in that process is a series of town meetings, the first scheduled for Nov. 3. “It will be an open meeting, held in a large room, and I hope that people will come,” Wise said. “I’ll say a few words, but there will be plenty of time for dialogue.”
At that time, she will be presenting a first draft of the vision statement, created out of meetings with key groups around the University. Subsequent town hall meetings are planned at various locations on the Seattle campus, with meetings on the Bothell and Tacoma campuses as well.
Wise will also have a role in the Leadership, Community and Values Initiative. She is scheduled to meet as often as possible with the initiative team, which has spent the summer analyzing the results of its Universitywide survey as well as the issues raised in discussion groups and interviews with key leaders.
The new provost called her first meeting with the initiative team “inspiring,” and said the initiative had “taken on a life of its own.” The initiative team also plans meetings — four “involvement workshops” for campus leaders in September at which a preliminary action plan will be drafted. The final workshop will be with the President’s Cabinet and the Board of Deans. A summary of the initiative team’s report and action plan will be published in the Oct. 27 University Week. Wise will attend the involvement workshops.
“The only danger of [such an initiative] is you clearly outline what the faculty and staff expect,” Wise said, “and if there’s no follow-through I think there’s a greater disappointment than if you never did it in the first place.”
Wise will be part of the follow-through. In fact, one of her first priorities after the presentation of the initiative report and the draft vision statement will be to examine the responsibilities of each position in her own office and its relation to the vision of the University.
“We really want to serve the community and be nimble at it,” she said. “In the preliminary results of the survey, there were some statements that people don’t know what upper level administration does. Although they know we’re supposed to be helping enable the community to do what it wants to do, they don’t know whether we do it and how we do it and what are the measures of success. So I think once we have a vision statement and I know a little bit more about what we’re all striving for, that we’ll be able to position the provost’s office in a way that we can serve those needs.”
She also said she plans to use every means possible to communicate with faculty and staff — from university publications to speeches to meetings with groups and individuals.
Wise said she is impressed with faculty and staff’s commitment to make the University better. “To be as wonderful as we already are and then to strive to be even better is what attracted me here,” she said.
In addition to her work inside the University, Wise said she looks forward to partnering with President Mark Emmert to tell the UW story to constituents in the community — a job she sees as critically important in this era of limited resources.
But if she’s playing in a chamber group, Wise recognizes that as the University’s chief academic and chief budgetary officer, her voice may carry a little more weight than others in the group. “I like the statement ‘prima inter parus,’ the concept of being first among equals,” she said.
