Fourteen Years and 700 Ad Hocs Later, Cole Moves On

When Jonathan Cole steps down as provost at the end of the academic year, he will leave behind him a legacy of accomplishments unmatched by any Columbia administrator since Nicholas Murray Butler.

It is an apt comparison. Butler, in 43 years as University president, established Columbia as a world-class research university. Cole, in 14 years as provost and more than 40 at Columbia, has helped lead Columbia back to the ranks of the nation's elite institutions.

Cole, like Butler, has his critics, but none can doubt his influence.

The three presidents he has served, especially former University President George Rupp, may get more attention, but it is Cole whose term as provost spanned the full time of Columbia's renaissance. Michael Sovern helped start Columbia on the road to rebirth, Rupp was there when Columbia turned a corner, and Lee Bollinger, it is hoped, will continue the progress begun by his predecessors. But only Cole has been there for it all.

"Jonathan's strength and boldness have allowed us to rise as a university from some pretty unattractive doldrums into the eminence we now enjoy," said University Professor Edward Said at a dinner held in Cole's honor last month.

Cole, 60, has spent his entire adult life at Columbia. He entered in 1960 as an undergraduate, and eventually earned a B.A. in history and Ph.D. in sociology from the University. He stayed on as a professor, teaching sociology and Contemporary Civilizations until 1987, when he became vice president for arts and sciences under then-President Sovern. Two years later, Sovern made him provost.

From the beginning, Cole has viewed his job as encompassing every aspect of the University. Early in his term as provost, Cole chaired a strategic planning group that laid out eight priorities for the 1990s, including bringing the undergraduate college to the center of the University, enhancing the quality of the faculty, improving the health sciences, and capitalizing on Columbia's location in New York City. To a greater or lesser extent, every one of those goals has been met.

"It was a strategic plan that was actually followed," Cole said with some amazement. "Most strategic plans that come out of large groups in large committees get put on a shelf and you never hear of them again."

Cole says there are two central ways in which the University has changed since 1989.

First, the quality of the University--from faculty to students to facilities--is "substantially enhanced," he said.

"If there was a mantra that I had, going in and coming out, it was 'quality, quality, quality,'" Cole said.

Secondly, and equally importantly, Cole said, the University now has its own identity.

"For 30 years being around here, there was just too much of a psychology of 'How can we imitate Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton?'" Cole said. "Somehow Columbia was always searching for its identity. What makes us unique, what makes us special, different from those other schools? ... I think that hasn't gone all the way to where it should be in our minds, but its trajectory has been distinctly upward."

Columbia has not yet escaped the shadow of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but Cole said he believes it is catching up. The revival of New York City has no doubt helped, he said, but so has Columbia's decision--his decision--to embrace Columbia's unique identity as a uniquely New York institution.

"The students we bring are different, not smarter in terms of IQ or SAT scores, ... but just different, infinitely more curious," Cole said. "A restless energy fills them, a kind of skepticism, which you don't find in equal quantity in my opinion in any of the other three institutions that I was mentioning before."

Cole's central focus, like that of any provost, has been the faculty. Cole helped recruit distinguished faculty from around the country, including Simon Schama, the well-known historian, Horst Stormer, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and, more recently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and, in a coup, economist Jeffrey Sachs, who left Harvard to come to Columbia.

Cole also chaired the ad hoc committees that review every candidate for tenure, and sat on some 700 such committees as provost. He made the final recommendation to the president and the Board of Trustees on every appointment, and proudly notes that he was not once overruled.

But Cole's reach went far beyond the traditional duties of the provost as the University's chief academic officer. He sat on budget review committees, oversaw athletics, and was instrumental in the founding of a new K-8 lab school on 110th Street, which will open in the fall. He counts the University's improved finances and relationship with the community among his accomplishments, although he does not claim to be solely responsible for them.

Cole's involvement in every aspect of the University has drawn some criticism from the faculty, as has his determination to make changes, sometimes with little consultation. But Cole says he has never shut his door to any member of the faculty, and he says much of what he accomplished would never have gotten done had he waited for everyone to be satisfied that the discussion was over.

"I do think there was a tremendous amount of what came through that was bottom-up, but there was also perhaps more top-down decision making than some faculty members would feel comfortable with," Cole said. "That was done, at least in my judgment, to move things along."

And if Cole has his critics, he has staunch defenders as well. He is credited with helping revive the social sciences at Columbia, which were struggling when he became provost, and the health sciences, an area Cole knew little about when he took over, have undergone a renaissance under his leadership.

Cole has also been a staunch defender of academic freedom. In 2000, when Said was photographed throwing a rock across the Israeli-Lebanon border, Cole responded to calls for Said's firing with a strongly worded letter in defense of Said's rights as a professor. More recently, during the controversy surrounding visiting Professor Tom Paulin's remarks about Israel, Cole wrote another letter to the faculty.

"In the past, even as many other national institutions gave way, Columbia withstood pressures both from without and within to sanction speech, to enact speech codes or to dismiss professors who expressed controversial political views," Cole wrote.

"Columbia's defense of its faculty and students is, after all, a defense of its own mission, a mission that we will not abandon today any more than we did yesterday. Columbia's history of steadfast defense of thought and speech is a source of pride to us today."

Said praised Cole's commitment to free speech.

"You have never backed away from a challenge to freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, freedom of academic activity, in all the times that I know you have been challenged and, I know from my own lamentable case, sorely tried," Said said in his remarks last month. "Really Jonathan, you must know that your combination of fairness, fearlessness, and willingness to speak out--particularly at this rather scoundrelly time--has been a major contribution to the foundations of thought and culture in our country."

Cole has had his failures. He was an early and ardent backer of Fathom.com, Columbia's online learning portal that eventually cost the University millions of dollars without ever turning a profit. And Cole is widely seen as the person responsible for Rupp's 1997 firing of Dean of Columbia College Austin Quigley, a decision that was quickly rescinded over Cole's objections.

Cole may be the last provost to wield such wide influence. Already, areas such as online learning and the Biosphere II in Arizona have been taken over by Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin, and Bollinger has announced that incoming provost Alan Brinkley will not be responsible for health sciences, at least in the beginning. Bollinger has also said he hopes to be more involved in academic decisions than his predecessors.

Cole acknowledged that the provost's role is changing, but he said he decided to step down because it was simply time to move on. Cole will take a year off to write a book on universities, and then plans to return to teaching and research at Columbia. He said his next challenge is to try to write books for broad audiences.

"I felt there was one more real change," Cole said, echoing Rupp's reason for retiring when he did. "For me, it's now an opportunity to go back, to stay at Columbia, and to contribute to it in other ways."