Joseph Glover, the final candidate for the provost position at the University of Arizona, is now on campus for his final interviews.
Glover is arguably the most well-known of the three candidates, as he served as provost at the University of Florida for 15 years. He stepped down from that role in 2023 to serve as a senior advisor to the university’s new president, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.
Glover
He is the only candidate who has experience serving in the provost role. After attending Cornell University and the University of California San Diego, Glover taught at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Rochester before being hired at the University of Florida in 1982. He stayed there for the next 40 years.
While provost, the university was named the No. 5 public university in the country in 2022 by the U.S. News and World Report. It is currently tied for No. 6 — the UA sits at No. 115 on the same list.
Glover spearheaded the UF’s AI initiative and oversaw the birth of the UF Online program, which, according to an article released by the university in 2023, is ranked No. 1 among online baccalaureate programs.
He also emphasized faculty hiring with the Preeminence program to hire 100 faculty, followed by the faculty 500 hiring plan, followed most recently by the AI 100 hiring plan, all of which pumped faculty and resources into academic units.
Despite these successes, Glover has also seen his fair share of controversy, partially because of the Florida state government’s conservative leanings clashing with its public universities.
According to articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Glover, alongside then-University President W. Kent Fuchs, declined to enact mask or vaccine mandates in 2021 because of threats to their jobs. Additionally, the outlet reported, Glover did not support “critical studies of race.”
In another 2021 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the outlet reported that Glover authored a draft policy on the tenure process, requiring tenured faculty at the UF to undergo a “comprehensive periodic review” every five years to “refocus academic and professional efforts, when appropriate.” Final decisions on whether or not a faculty member reviewed was successful, would fall to the provost (who at the time was Glover).
Faculty members interviewed by the Chronicle at the time worried about the proposal limiting checks and balances within the system and possibly eroding or dismantling the tenure system.
The university’s first candidate, Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, recently dropped out of the search after accepting the provostship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The search is now between Glover and Marie Hardin, the current dean of the College of Communication at Pennsylvania State University, who visited campus last week.
