Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                            Matt Dulin    Barrett Goldsmith    Zach Lee 
                Jim Parsons            Christian Schmidt           Blake Whitaker

Three down

Richard Edwards, the third provost candidate to visit the UH campus, was honest about why he wanted the University's top academic position.

"It's partially because I'm crazy," he said during a forum introducing him to the community. Who knows? Maybe you'd have to be, but we can't imagine why.

Edwards, a distinguished social work professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, may be crazy, but at least he has good rapport with faculty. That shouldn't come as a surprise, as most of his experience comes from being either a faculty member himself or as a dean and at one point, as interim provost.

Edwards' most winning trait was his straightforwardness about shared governance, stemming from both particular experience with academic governance and knowledge of how administrations work. He believes shared governance should operate with realistic boundaries and faculty should be included in decision-making as much as possible. 

With shared governance still experiencing a sort of renaissance in the halls of the Faculty Senate, a provost who has an idea how to make the practice realistically workable could be a boon to the faculty. However, at the same time, his preconceptions about shared governance's limitations could be seen as restrictive. Edwards must be willing to adapt to UH's unique culture, being a young, vibrant University.

In the open forum, Edwards called little attention to his background in social work ? a field he studied in every stage of his academic career ? but he was keen to note his savvy with external donors as dean of UNC's School of Social Work. There, he took a paltry $1.7 million funding pool, and in eight years, shored up that number to $15 million. 

Edwards isn't a sore thumb in the bunch of candidates we've seen so far. If anything, he's further evidence that UH has a strong slate from which to choose its next provost.
 

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