In a Q&A with Penn Today, Provost John L. Jackson Jr. reflects on his first year as provost, Penn’s strategic framework In Principle and Practice, and upholding academic independence.
John L. Jackson Jr., Penn’s 31st provost.
Provost John L. Jackson Jr. thinks a lot about questions.
In part, this can be attributed to Jackson’s career as a theorist and ethnographer, penning anthropological texts and making films, asking informed and sometimes uncomfortable questions. And, true to his role as chair of the Red and Blue Advisory Committee that would set the stage for the In Principle and Practice strategic framework, he considers himself a practiced listener.
Because, as any researcher or leader might know, the aim is to not just ask questions—it’s to learn to ask better questions. And then, build bridges to enact meaningful change.
“I think one of the most important things you can do as a provost is be curious,” says Jackson. “Thinking about not just what you can learn from different experts all around campus in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and across our health schools, but also trying to connect interesting dots between and among them.
“Your goal, I think, is to be open and curious enough to be doing that kind of connective work all the time, thinking about the underlying intellectual architecture of the campus that allows you to see how different parts of this incredibly eclectic, intellectual environment are interlaced.”
Here, Jackson discusses his first year as provost, upholding academic independence, and cultivating an environment of collaboration across disciplines and departments.
It’s been a year since you started as provost. What do you think you’ve learned about Penn in this role that you didn’t know in the others?
One of the things you learn—you see this as a dean, but I think it comes home with even more clarity from the Provost’s Office—is just how much of a team effort everything we do here at the University is. There isn’t a single decision that’s made by an individual who isn’t constantly trying to figure out what other people are seeing that they can’t see. Everyone is constantly in conversation with partners across campus. That includes student leaders, faculty leaders, and administrators, all working together to ensure that we’re thinking about critical issues as carefully and comprehensively as possible.
I think being in this office has really brought that home to me in profound and even inspiring ways. There are so many people doing the work to increase the likelihood that when we make a decision, when we get to a solution, we feel like we’ve asked and answered all the necessary questions. There are few perfect answers, but there is enhanced confidence in knowing how and why you’ve come to a specific decision, and how you justify moving a certain plan forward.
You’ve also had a chance to see In Principle and Practice get introduced following your work as chair of the Red and Blue Committee. What has that process been and what does that work look like?
It has been exciting to articulate what we think we learned through extensive listening sessions over many months, analyzing a great deal of anonymous online comments, and incorporating written feedback from every School and major academic unit on campus. The committee’s work now translates into some important overarching principles and Penn-specific practices that represent the culmination of all the organic convergences between and among how different members of the Penn community think about the present and potential future of this institution.
This year, we’re prioritizing all the key elements that the community has told us are vitally important going forward – taking the concepts, values, themes and priorities excavated by the Red and Blue Committee’s work and translating them into concrete new initiatives that impact Penn’s campus, our local community, and the entire world. For example, our newly announced Draw Down the Lightning Grants are meant to make it clear that this work demands all of us: faculty, students, postdocs, and staff. It is a campus-wide effort.
We believe that In Principle and Practice is going to be a powerful beacon and roadmap for us. We think this is a big-tented version of what the future of Penn can be.
There are two new leadership positions forthcoming: the vice provosts for climate and art. How do you see those fitting into the strategic vision?
Climate and the arts are two themes that the Red and Blue Committee heard about over and over again. We’re now in the process of identifying leaders to serve as Penn’s inaugural vice provosts for both of those areas. We tapped excellent and committed faculty, staff, and students this summer to help us organize our search and vet the compelling list of applicants to those posts. Given the work of both committees and their fantastic chairs, we are in a good position to make announcements about both positions before the end of this semester. And I think the charge for these two posts will be similar in some ways.
There’s already so much going on across all 12 Schools related to climate science, policy, and practice, so we need someone who is going to carefully take stock of what’s here, help us to coordinate as effectively as we can between and among those units, and then articulate within the Penn community and to the outside world why this is important, why it matters now, and what our approach is to conveying next steps. And making sure there’s a way for Penn—and I think there is—to help move the needle significantly around really serious climate-related concerns. The Vice Provost for the Arts is also meant to support coordination, in this case between and among our amazing arts institutions on campus, to make a case for the existential importance of the arts to us as a species, and to help articulate a vision for the future of the arts at Penn for years to come.
So, both leaders are going to coordinate our efforts and communicate those efforts to a variety of audiences on and off campus. We have a lot of excellent resources in both domains, and we want to have confidence that we are marshaling those resources effectively, building on what we do now in a strategic way.
In In Principle and Practice, one of the challenges laid out is data and AI, which is a unique one because it’s also an opportunity. How is the University thinking about integrating AI—what is our approach now?
Senior Vice Provost for Research Dawn Bonnell has been consulting with a group of distinguished faculty leaders from across the Schools about what we’re doing now in AI, how we can best articulate and represent our AI strengths, and what we need to put in place to make sure we continue to attract innovative thinkers in this area. We want to make sure that we operationalize what we’re doing in ways that will matter to current and future students and faculty. She will be reporting more about this work at University Council next month.
We also have institutions like the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Innovation that will help us figure out what it means to integrate some of this into emergent iterations of what pedagogy looks like in the 21st century. Leaning into faculty expertise is the first and most important way to begin to frame what is going to be an unexpected road ahead. Faculty can help us think through how and why this AI push is going to be transformational in the ways that we’ve already begun to appreciate, and in ways that we probably haven’t started to imagine yet.
Penn has two major facilities going online in the next few months: Amy Gutmann Hall and the Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology. How do you see those cultivating collaborations for these challenges like AI, and beyond?
We’re building spaces that are designed to cultivate genuine collaboration across all kinds of differences: methodological ones, disciplinary ones, differences in approach and perspective. Both Amy Gutmann Hall and the Vagelos Lab are examples of bringing thinkers from different Schools and intellectual traditions together, and creating lab space, meeting space, and other opportunities for researchers to be in close-quartered contact around important themes, whether it’s energy or data science. These two new buildings are state-of-the-art examples of trying to create even more opportunities for interesting kinds of collaborative possibilities. I think this is something that students will feel and appreciate, whether they’re in classroom spaces designed with that in mind, or in labs with faculty members from different disciplines working together on critical scientific questions.
Do you have an update on the work to update the Open Expression guidelines? What can people expect from the Task Force?
This is a faculty-led committee with two fantastic co-chairs, Lisa Bellini and Sigal Ben-Porath, and they are already hard at work. There is a lot for this committee to do, and I think one of the most important things for us to figure out right now is how to cultivate a space where our students and the entire Penn community feel comfortable talking across differences. They should feel like they’re participating in spaces where divergent opinions, carefully researched and articulated, are valued and respected.
This committee has the task of trying to figure out how Penn can most responsibly operationalize those commitments and values on our campus in ways that are distinctive to us, even as we see versions of these kinds of questions also being asked and answered in other universities in other parts of the country. I think the Task Force is going to do a lot of thinking about potential improvements to our policies and processes, and making sure that, when their work is done, they feel confident that they have some recommendations that will enable Penn to continue to affirm its long-standing commitment to being a space where people can talk candidly and respectfully across differences of position and ideology.
The University put out two statements on values and upholding academic independence. Why is now an important moment to state our values?
On the question of institutional voice, we’ve been thinking through this for a long time. Some of this is about making sure that there’s consistency across campus, and it’s also about clearing space for faculty expertise to carry the day on important issues relevant to their scholarship. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance the opportunities for members of our community to talk across differences and not just presume that the institution has prefabricated answers to these really complicated and often political and politicized questions.
What do you see as the big challenges ahead as the semester and academic year get started?
First, as I mentioned earlier, we want to cultivate an intellectual environment where students don’t feel like they have to self-censor, where people can talk across differences of opinion constructively and respectfully. We have a lot of faculty expertise and University units that continue to help us cultivate such spaces and interactional expertise on campus.
Along these lines, we just announced the new Office for Religious and Ethnic Inclusion, which will work to make sure students, faculty, staff, and the entire Penn community feel safe from identity-based harassment and discrimination, and having candid conversations in a safe and tolerant environment is critical.
We’re also not going to stop thinking about how we should implement the recommendations we received from the Task Force and Commission. We have Deputy Provost Beth Winkelstein leading that charge, which is truly going to be a campus-wide effort.
And we are going to announce more exciting new initiatives under the auspices of In Principle and Practice. This semester and moving forward, we are going to keep emphasizing what we think is so important about our ambitious new strategic framework—and about the role every member of our community can play in making sure it has a measurably positive impact on Penn’s future.
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