Thorp: A strong choice, despite baggage
On Sept. 13, 2012, following the announcement of Provost Ed Macias’ retirement, Student Life ran a staff editorial on Macias’ accomplishments and our hopes for his replacement. In that editorial, we recalled that under Macias’ tenure, the seven-minute passing rule was extended to 10 minutes and the disparity between men’s and women’s pay was greatly reduced—and in three schools, women’s salaries now exceed men’s. Because the deans of all seven schools report to the provost, we also called for an interdisciplinary-minded hire for the role of the University’s chief academic officer. On Feb. 18, 2013, after a nearly-five-month search, Washington University announced its new provost for the 2013-14 academic year, Holden Thorp.
On paper, Thorp seems an unlikely candidate for provost mainly because of his impressive background. As the current chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he will take a positional demotion from chancellor of a top-30 public university to serve as the provost of a top-15 private university. He will transition from an undergraduate student body of more than 18,000 to one a third of its size. He will move from a culture of Division I athletes to a spirit of Division III student-athletes at a place where academics supersede athletics and the last poetry slam hosted a larger student audience than the last sporting event.
But perhaps that’s why he’s leaving. In the midst of an NCAA investigation into the questionable academic practices surrounding UNC-CH sports, maybe Thorp hoped to distance himself from tarnish by association. He had already declared his intent to hang up his chancellor’s robe and return to the chemistry classroom effective June 30, 2013. With Wash. U.’s announcement, on July 1 he will exchange his Carolina blue for red and green and will trade in fears of athletes receiving credit for nonexistent African and Afro-American Studies classes for fears of engineers installing keyloggers on teaching assistants’ computers. At least at Wash. U., Thorp doesn’t have to worry about the alumni donor fallout from NCAA sanctions.
The Wash. U. way may prove jarring to Thorp at first. Here, community is built around the arts and sciences. Here, students compete for academic scholarships rather than athletic ones. Here, as provost, Thorp will have ample opportunity to embrace his inherent multidisciplinary nature.
Though he received a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology, Thorp is a veritable renaissance man. He was reared in the theater, at 17 studied guitar at Berklee College of Music, once won a regional Rubik’s Cube-solving competition and is now an accomplished jazz musician and pianist. Thorp obtained his doctorate in three years, rather than the typical five, and became one of the youngest chancellors in the United States when he took the UNC-CH office in 2008. He holds 12 patents, co-founded a pharmaceuticals group and has published 130 scholarly articles. He also maintains an active digital presence on Twitter (@chanthorp) and on his UNC blog. While we had hoped the next high-ranking University official would come from a non-hard-science discipline following the appointment of Jen Smith, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, to dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Thorp’s diverse background and commitment to the arts gives us hope that his Wash. U. leadership will one day be held with the same reverence as Macias’. We’re pro-Thorp and hope soon his Twitter handle will be, too.
Thank you for your enthusiastic welcome of my university’s former chancellor, Holden Thorp, a “veritable renaissance man” with an “inherent multidisciplinary nature” who will take the position of provost at your school next academic year.
I also thank you for giving Thorp his due credit, especially in your list of his accomplishments at the end of your piece. He is a truly extraordinary and accomplished person, and I appreciate that his new school recognizes this as much as his old one does.
But I’d like to gently call your attention to a few weak spots in your editorial. Who am I to do this, you might exclaim. After all, I’m a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, the cultureless den of iniquity in which Thorp has been helplessly imprisoned for the past five years, forced to keep that multidisciplinary nature of his under wraps.
Consider me a peer. Like you, I’ve worked for my university’s newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel (one of the top college newspapers in the country). I used to edit the arts section, which published stories about UNC’s internationally renowned repertory theater company, our performing arts program that’s hosted acts from Yo-Yo Ma to Big Boi, and countless decorated student arts groups alongside coverage of our sports teams.
So, if I’ve earned it, here are a few things in your piece that I took issue with.
“[Thorp] will move from a culture of Division I athletes to a spirit of Division III student-athletes at a place where academics supersedes athletics and the last poetry slam hosted a larger student audience than the last sporting event.” (graph 2)
Yes, we Tar Heels like and support our Division I athletics teams. I don’t think that, in and of itself, is the massive moral deficiency you’re making it out to be. Yes, our Division I football team has messed up, but hosts of our other very skilled Division I athletes do fit the “student-athlete” bill (for instance, Tyler Zeller, of last year’s very successful basketball team, was named an Academic All-American). And I’m not sure that your distinction between my university’s lowly “culture” and Wash U’s purer “spirit” is necessary.
I also must mention that, at UNC-Chapel Hill, we have more than our fair share of poetry slams, which draw plenty of people. Similarly well-attended are the student-produced plays, the student-run TEDxUNC conference, and lectures by people like Noam Chomsky and Jackson Katz. It’s less a shortcoming of our university than it is a fact of the modern world that sporting events tend to draw more spectators than artistic ones.
“In the midst of an NCAA investigation into the questionable academic practices surrounding UNC-CH sports, maybe Thorp hoped to distance himself from tarnish by association.” (graph 3)
Thorp has anything but distanced himself from said investigation. He’s dealt with it for over two years, made the extremely controversial decision to fire Butch Davis, and has accumulated a good bit of “tarnish.”
“He will trade in fears of athletes receiving credit for nonexistent African and Afro-American studies classes for fears of engineers installing keyloggers on teaching assistants’ computers.” (graph 3)
Wash U’s creepy keystroke logging surveillance doesn’t really sound more appealing than your shallow understanding of UNC’s academic scandal.
“The Wash. U. way may prove jarring to Thorp at first.” (graph 4)
It’s sweet that you’re concerned, as though dear old HoTho has spent his tenure at UNC in the grips of something like Stockholm syndrome, but I think he’ll muddle through.
“Here, community is built around the arts and sciences.” (graph 4)
As it is here. We’re not a collection of sports-playing and sports-watching robots who only use the academic buildings for tailgates in the event of inclement weather—we’re a university with enormous research capabilities in both the arts and the sciences. For example, see our recently built and highly capable Genome Sciences Building. Or Wilson Library, whose Southern Folklife Collection is one of the most comprehensive archival resources of folk music in the nation.
“Here, students compete for academic scholarships rather than athletic ones.” (graph 4)
1) http://honorscarolina.unc.edu/current-students/resources/office-for-distinguished-scholarships/
2) http://scholarsprogram.unc.edu/
3) http://www.moreheadcain.org/
4) http://www.robertsonscholars.org/
5) http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/creative/scholarships/tws
Et cetera.
I hope I haven’t overstepped a boundary here. My comments come from a sympathetic place—I’ve certainly made my share of factual errors and tonal misjudgments in print before. I’m sure this piece was assigned to you in haste, and you were left grasping for an angle. And I’m sure you wrote it under a great deal of pressure, given the considerable academic demands of a Wash U education that you have intimated. But, due to my compulsive affection for and pride in my university, I couldn’t keep myself from defending it. Be nice to Thorp next year—he deserves it.
Dr. Thorp appears to have all of the qualifications to be an excellent provost. And don’t worry, his hard science degree exposed him to many humanities, social science, and writing courses. A clarification: the gender-based salary disparities mentioned are for faculty only. It’s a good start.
I think your editorial board is looking at a horse’s dentures. Thorp seems very-but-not-overly qualified and there may be a multitude of reasons for him to accept the position…including chances of a later presidency at WUSTL.
As the Shadow once sorta said, who knows what lurks in the hearts of men. Your point onhis interdisciplinary potential is especially well taken.