Of both deans and provosts I say, "if there must be such people I would like them to have my values" -- the values of learning and then teaching what one learns. By this method I have now come to hold both offices. In moving from the one to other, I hope only not to lose touch with the real life of the university and the real people actively and daily engaged in learning and teaching. The provost is the university's chief academic officer and the chief architect of its budget. My principal aim in this position is to ensure that academic and educational principles guide the methods by which we build the budget and not the reverse.
There is, of course, much more both to learn and to teach now than there used to be. But much of what one hopes to accomplish with students has not changed in quite a long time. One hopes to produce an awakening, a stretching, an insatiable desire for more learning about more things. Undergraduate education ought to be a bit like falling in love -- so thrilling that one cannot quite believe that anyone else has ever felt this way before. The teacher in these circumstances must try to recreate for a long series of individuals the experience of a first-time thrill. As a professor of music, I have taught Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a great many times and no longer eagerly seek out opportunities to hear it yet again. But every one of my students is entitled to the thrill of experiencing it for the first time. My pedagogical task, then, is to put myself in mind of that first encounter.
Amid all of the challenges facing higher education, then, and with all of the attendant talk about the need for change, the greatest challenge is to accomplish ever more effectively some of the same old things. Alas, accomplishments of this kind (even in quantity) do not usually make the evening news (nor does falling in love, even as the prelude to a lifetime of happiness and fulfillment). But I hope that whatever title I bear, I shall facilitate such accomplishments for the greatest possible number of our students and faculty members. It means, curiously, that the less I get to do of them, the more important it is that I be able to remember what learning and teaching feel like on a daily basis. And that will mean continuing to feel close to the College of Arts and Sciences.
Don M. Randel
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