Advocate-in-chief Chris Clemens takes office

The Well caught up with Provost and Chief Academic Officer Chris Clemens six weeks after he stepped into his new role on Feb. 1. He explained the reasoning behind his title change, why he’s excited about plans for the new School of Data Science and Society and much more.

How has the transition been so far?

It’s been a busy six weeks, but I’m feeling full of energy. The whole team is energized. We’ve been doing a lot of listening. I’ve really enjoyed working with my executive vice provost, Amy Locklear Hertel, and the transition team. Everyone continues to reach out and make new channels of communication. They’re working hard to make sure we hear concerns but, more importantly, the good stories that we need to be telling on behalf of our faculty. A great university is its people, and getting to know the people here and learn about their work so we can advance that work is a pleasure and a privilege.

Some concrete priorities have come forward in these first six weeks. One of them is faculty advancement. I’ve talked a lot about that in the Faculty Council meetings. We want to focus this office on learning how to support our faculty and their careers. That will be something you hear over and over.

We also want to think about governance. We’ve been looking at our internal governance processes and trying to get them in order so that everybody understands them. We know what the procedures are, and we know in those cases where the governance is shared and how it’s shared. This is detailed, tedious work, but it’s important work.

And we want to tell the great stories of our faculty and their research. During the pandemic, UNC was a shining star. I don’t know that everyone in this state appreciates the degree to which the work done here mitigated so much of the pandemic.

Explain the thinking behind your title change, to provost and chief academic officer from executive vice chancellor and provost.

The title change goes with the role that I think a chief academic officer and my team should play, which is advocate-in-chief for the faculty. It’s about branding the mission as we see the mission. It’s not just me; it’s the whole team.

This office is the place that needs to look after faculty and faculty advancement, also staff and students — our people, broadly speaking.

One thing we plan to do is help faculty gain academy memberships and win national awards. We have those faculty. But we haven’t institutionally taken on the work of making sure they get nominated. People submit nominations for their fellow faculty or staff out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s a lot of work, and we don’t offer them very much support. We can structure better support for that and make it part of our routine business. The medical school has the Office of Faculty Affairs and Leadership Development. We’re looking at that as a model for the whole campus.

Why are academy memberships and awards important?

We want our faculty to sit in the room with their peers, to have the standing or stature that goes with having these awards, these memberships. We also want to be in those national academies to influence. Almost all the academies produce works of scholarship — about current affairs, about events in the world. We want our faculty to have a voice in those scholarly societies. It’s one of many aspects of looking after the careers of faculty. It will also enhance the institution’s reputation, but the main reason is so faculty get the recognition they deserve.

What other ways will you advocate for faculty?

Our governance needs to be responsive. We have a Faculty Council. We have points of engagement for the faculty. But I don’t think we’ve always been nimble and responsive in the way we administer policy. Part of what we owe faculty is to be good at that, even if it’s tedious.

We need more transparency so that faculty can better understand the logic of budgetary decisions that affect their units or their schools. We need a better common understanding of what the constraints are so that decisions don’t seem arbitrary. And with better understanding, more people can participate in decision making. I think we owe that to faculty.

The last thing I’ll say is we’re constantly getting misaligned — misaligned with each other, misaligned with our governing boards, misaligned with the people of our state. And I think we need to be conscious of where we’re actually in agreement, to be visibly aligned and working together, because that’s how you advance an institution. So I think we owe it to our faculty to take some time to work on aligning our objectives with those of all the stakeholders and to make sure we’re doing what the state expects of us, because they send us a lot of money and we’d like to use it well.

What are some other top leadership priorities?

We have to be thoughtful about diversity across the institution to make sure that we’re not taking a narrow view of what constitutes a scholar.

We have to be very focused on efficiencies, financial and otherwise. As I said in the most recent Faculty Council meeting, we have to make time and space for detailed work, which is not necessarily going to be visible. That detailed work might not appear to be rewarding, but it builds a careful substructure for the progress you want to make. I think that’s embedded in this top priority about how we support and promote the work of the faculty.

It may mean we have to think about our expectations for people. There are fields in which the attitude has been “no limits.” That is, whatever you’re asking me to do today, I will do more for you tomorrow, and I will excel, and I will excel again. And if you add another channel in which you want me to excel, I’ll excel in that, too. That’s an unrealistic expectation that people put both on themselves and that we put on one another — that you can do it all. That’s a fiction.

We have incredible people who do way more than you would think possible. The analogy here is to Olympic athletes. If you watch someone who’s at the top of their sport and you compare it to your performance, they seem almost supernatural in their ability to do some things that, because we’re not trained, you and I can’t do. Our faculty are like superstar athletes. They’re so good at some of the things they do that I’m in awe of their performance. But that doesn’t mean the performance doesn’t have limits. And our expectations should be calibrated against the fact that they have families, that they have lives.

I think the pandemic brought us a little back to the idea that sometimes the answer is no. We need time to think and attend to the details in a way that maintains the professional level of excellence that we need from one another. It’s not carelessness. It’s too many things on the plate. And the only way to fix that is to have some manageable expectations about what will be on the plate.

What’s the latest on the School of Data Science and Society? Is it still on track for a fall 2022 launch?

We have a funding request in front of the system office and the state. Our ability to announce a launch is connected to having the funds. I want to do this in order. I want to be sure that we’ve got what we need to go forward, so I’m not going to set a deadline because I don’t know when we’re going to hear back on the funding request.

That said, the activity will certainly launch and even before the fall. We are in the process of appointing an academic lead. We have four internal candidates and a group of deans and others who are going to advise me on the selection of someone who can begin the work of the school even before it’s been formally announced. So we’re in the quiet phase of the school, but the work is ongoing, because there’s a lot of stuff to line up before we launch a curriculum.

Why is this new school important, and what will differentiate it from other data science schools?

You will note the name of the school, which was thoughtfully decided by teams of faculty. The “and society” part is the distinguishing characteristic.

Let me talk about what that means. When Andy Warhol said that everyone would enjoy their 15 minutes of fame in the future, it was a visionary statement. With the internet, it is literally true that small kids in America are world famous for 15 minutes on YouTube. Everybody remembers Charlie and his finger getting bitten. But there’s a corollary that’s a little darker, which is: In the future, no one will be able to enjoy 15 minutes of privacy. We’ll be like Winston Smith (in Orwell’s “1984”), cowering in the corner of his room where the cameras can’t see him in order to be alone. The “and society” part is going to grapple not just with the power of data, but we will also be thinking about the ethics of data, its impact on society and how one manages in a world where the amount of data being collected on everything and everyone is immense.

The countermeasure to information in abundance is disinformation in abundance, and we’re seeing that already, too. So there are many dimensions of data science that I think Carolina is uniquely suited to take on. That’s why we want “and society” in there, because we want the strengths of our existing School of Information and Library Science — which is world renowned in some of these areas — and we want security experts, which we have in computer science, as well as our statisticians and scientists. And we want ethicists. We want the humanities. We want philosophers to think about this. We want to hear from humanists who use data in their research. Most people, when they think of data, are thinking of numbers. But how do you measure and assess around qualitative measures? What are the measures around ethics and values that one can assess in a data-oriented way? And what about the methods that we’ve used to collect data over time? What do we do with unethical data sets? There’s a whole lot of background on the life cycle of data that will matter both for our culture and our campus. I think we will have a very strong presence in that area in this school.

You helped launch the Institute for Convergent Science. How is it faring after two years of a global pandemic?

We actually built it during the pandemic, and some very good things happened. The premise there is that you can organize your thinking in two different ways. Universities organize around disciplines. Convergent science says forget about that: Ask questions.

There’s an art to knowing which question is ripe both to ask and answer. And there’s also an art to knowing which question is going to thread together the existing elements on campus into some novel answer or solution. We learned a lot about that process by building a couple of projects around gene therapy, and now we’re supporting some faculty proposed projects.

The institute collaborates with UNC Research, Innovate Carolina, and is building strong connections with the NC Collaboratory led by Jeff Warren to take on convergent questions that matter for North Carolina. These questions touch workforce development. They touch economic development. They have a broad impact on the state if we get them right. So I’m bullish on the Institute for Convergent Science.

You also helped launch the Program for Public Discourse. What role does it serve, and why is it important?

When we started down that path, we knew that many of the challenges facing society and that the University was confronting in both our internal and external facing work had to do with people forgetting how to engage in the basics of discourse. The norms, which used to be well understood, evolved into near chaos. We don’t actually know what the norms are. In part, this happened because of the internet. What one might not say in person, one will always tweet.

This establishment of a common set of norms around discourse was really what that program was designed to do, though not from inception. From inception, it was meant to be something very different. But when we got our faculty — especially Larry Grossberg, Chris Lundberg, Sarah Treul, Carissa Hessick, Mark McNeilly, Donna Gilleskie and Molly Worthen — thinking about how you do a program in discourse, their idea was very much to focus on discourse as its own thing and to become experts at understanding what good discourse looks like and not to just make it dialogue.

Discourse is different. When you want to be persuasive, you present evidence. You marshal your evidence in favor of some proposition. That can sometimes be challenging to people because you’re looking at an evidence-based approach to ideas that may touch upon notions that are politically charged or, for matters of identity, sacrosanct. You need a set of norms for dealing with these things in the classroom. There are ways to channel the energy into better evidence-based thinking.

Kevin Marinelli, the executive director, is doing great work with faculty to train them how to make an environment in the classroom where constructive discourse can happen. One of the key principles is that every student should have to make arguments based on evidence for something they don’t believe — the ability to separate your core beliefs from a set of arguments that illuminate the process. This is what the adversarial system in law is about. There’s value in having it out at some level, even if and especially when you don’t agree with what the evidence is showing, because it clarifies what you must do in your counterargument to persuade an audience or a policymaker. That program is prospering because they focused on that core capacity, to use the language of our curriculum.

I think it will be a permanent and growing feature of our campus. I think Carolina has the chance to position itself as the place that knows how to do discourse and to establish norms that keep our discourse in bounds — to use an athletic analogy — and make sure that nobody gets harmed by the discourse, even if we rough each other up a little bit in the tumble of advocating for ideas with evidence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated decisions and operations for two years. What are your thoughts — and feelings — about what we’ve been through, and are you optimistic about the future?

I am optimistic. I think it’s a great time to be optimistic. We have laid some groundwork here in the pandemic that’s not visible yet that will matter for the future.

I’m also grateful to those who managed it. I feel fortunate that it’s drawing down a little bit and that I will be able to focus on something else and get some of our strategic priorities to move forward. That feels like a privilege after watching previous leaders grapple with difficult sets of questions.

My overall impression of the pandemic, looking back on it, is that our faculty, our staff and our students not only dealt with the setbacks, but in some ways, we knocked it out of the park. Research opened up several months into the pandemic. We had 5,000 researchers come back to campus.

We continued our research operation throughout the pandemic for two reasons. One, it mattered. The research brought antivirals onto the market. It brought vaccines onto the market in various ways. Not that they were all developed here, but the tools for developing them came from UNC. Some of the monoclonal antibody treatments were developed with our infectious disease experts. If we hadn’t been able to open our research that quickly, that could not have happened.

The other reason it was important is those federal dollars are on time clocks. We have a deadline to meet. And if we hadn’t been able to function, we wouldn’t have been able to do any of our research that had been funded. So I have praise for that operation, the research operation.

The same goes for our teaching faculty. People learned new modes of instruction, and those skills will stay with us. The staff were in the same position, but in some ways it was more difficult. There were parts of the University that needed staff to be here to function, despite their being at risk. These folks are often economically at the bottom of the ladder, and yet they were showing up and doing their work on campus throughout the pandemic. And that’s to say nothing of the staff who worked from home to do all of the HR, financial and logistics work that kept the research infrastructure and the teaching running.

Overall, I’m very optimistic. We’re different people today. We have really sharpened some things that are going to make life going forward better in lots of ways for our students. My optimism is not that we don’t have to deal with it any more. My optimism is that, like all hard things, there are benefits that we will continue to reap if we pay attention and don’t lose some of the momentum.