Sullivan announces new UVa provost

The University of Virginia announced the selection of a chemist and administrator from Duke University as the school’s new executive vice president and provost Wednesday.

With the appointment of John D. Simon, President Teresa A. Sullivan has filled both key administration vacancies the university faced. Sullivan said the task had been a top priority in her first year in office.

Simon, 54, called the job “the opportunity of a lifetime.” He is currently Duke’s vice provost for academic affairs.

“When I walked the Lawn … I felt I was standing on the Grounds that tell the story of higher education in America,” he said.

Sullivan praised Simon’s breadth of experience and his intellectual curiosity. She said she expected him to begin his work as the university’s top academic officer by going out and assessing the current state of the university.

Simon recounted the advice a colleague had given him: “When you take a job like this, you drink from the firehose.”

The university has two executive vice presidents: the provost and the chief operating officer. In May, Sullivan announced the selection of Michael Strine, of Johns Hopkins, as chief operating officer.

Simon replaces Dr. Arthur “Tim” Garson Jr., who had held that position since 2007. Strine is replacing Leonard W. Sandridge, a legendary university administrator who spent decades in the role.

Strine said the two are starting at an important time in terms of public discourse about higher education, dealing with the relationship between universities and research, the cost of tuition and public concerns about health care.

The two men are also starting as the university revamps its internal financial model to push more budgetary authority to deans, officials said. The school is still hunting for savings and is working to increase the number of graduates with science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees, Sullivan said.

She said costs have been saved by eliminating jobs that become vacant, rather than laying employees off, and that the school will continue to ask the state for money to pay for start-up costs for new science and engineering faculty. The costs center around creating new laboratories, often with special equipment, she said. The school is asking for an average of $600,000 for 39 new faculty members, but will pay their salaries out of its own funds. The request was denied in the last series of budget requests.

“The state will not be able to enroll more science and engineering students without more science and engineering faculty, and the bottleneck for us is equipping laboratories,” Sullivan said.

Other key priorities for the year ahead include faculty retention and repair work to be done to the Rotunda, Sullivan said, addressing the media and members of the university community in that building’s dome room.

Simon has degrees from Williams College and Harvard University and did post-doctoral work at the University of California at Los Angeles before working at the University of California at San Diego and Duke.

He spoke of Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to academic freedom.

“The university still stands for that limitless freedom,” he said.

Simon will officially take up his position Sept. 1. He is married to a professor at North Carolina Central and has two children.

Sullivan also reported that 5,511 donors gave more than $46.8 million during reunions weekend in June.