Nine and a half months into his term as provost and dean of the faculty, Rich Wicentowski, a professor in the computer science department, sat down for an interview with The Phoenix. Given the provost’s role in overseeing the college’s academic operations, the conversation addressed several current major academic questions facing the college, including the Swarthmore Forward strategic plan, grade inflation, faculty community and governance, and more. Wicentowski began on July 1, 2025, after a period of turnover in the office and an extensive college search to find the fourth provost in as many years.
In a September Swat Says column, several students showed a low level of understanding of the provost’s day-to-day responsibilities. Wicentowski offered some insight into this question by showing his weekly calendar, chock-full of meetings with various faculty and administration members every work day. “Those meetings are then used to shape other pieces of my job — the things I’m responsible for.”
Because of his engagement with college issues as a faculty member in computer science before becoming provost, Wicentowski said he entered the job with some understanding of the tasks it would entail. While he is enjoying the role thus far, he voiced that the demands of the job required significant adjustment. “There are some places where I feel like the amount of time that I’m given to do, say, strategic thinking, is limited by my calendar.”
In explaining the importance of the job, Wicentowski highlighted the elements of college operations that fall under the Provost’s Office responsibilities: academics, Information Technology Services, Libraries, Athletics, and several other sectors. The provost serves as the point person for all the members of those departments within the administration. “There’s plenty of good people who could do this job that aren’t me, but I think it’s important to have somebody in this job who is invested in the community — who’s invested in the students and the faculty and the staff who are all here and really want to make this place great, and so that’s why I stepped forward to do it.”
While he does oversee many departments, Wicentowski noted at several points throughout the interview that the role of his office was not to make top-down decisions or policies, but rather to listen to different campus constituents and facilitate conversations. “I lead some large number of committees, and we can work together to move things in a certain direction. But for example, if I’ve decided we’re really going to lean into a particular area and we’re going to start focusing on that and this, I really don’t have the power in this job to do that.”
Beyond this work to facilitate conversations among faculty, however, the provost does have influence over things like the prioritization of academic resources. According to Wicentowski, this includes the ability to allocate funding for efforts like faculty research and visiting assistant professorships. When departments come to Wicentowski to ask for more funding to pursue new initiatives, he said, “That’s a place where I have a little bit of power to sort of say, ‘That sounds like a really cool idea, we can use some resources there.’”
Given President Val Smith’s indication that the remainder of her time will be focused in large part on the implementation of the Swarthmore Forward strategic plan, Wicentowski was quick to highlight three big ways his office is involved in the initiative: the curricular review; review of the honors program and the creation of the Arts, Culture, and Technology program; and the first-year experience. The provost is also engaged with the ongoing development of a campus master plan, which involves “thinking about what are our building priorities, and how do they support the things that we’re trying to do.”
As the person overseeing the college’s academic program, the provost also sits on the curriculum committee. Having heard feedback from the Curriculum Review Team of Swarthmore Forward recently, Wicentowski feels that “the faculty as a whole are ‘lowercase- c’ conservative. People think things are working in general. There isn’t a desire to say, ‘Oh my gosh, the whole system is terrible. We should throw it out.’” Still, he noticed that there are places that faculty see as ripe for improvement. “It’ll be interesting to see if we all agree on the same places.”
Wicentowski struck a similar tone on the policies of the Honors Program. When asked about the lower number of students pursuing honors in recent years, he pushed back: “I don’t know that there’s a feeling that the current number that we’re at is [necessarily] too low. Maybe it was too high before, right?” What was important, he said, was the fact that all faculty want to support students who pursue Honors and to continue to make it a better program.
On the work to revamp the first-year academic experience, Wicentowski noted the possibilities of a first-year seminar for all incoming students. While not all first years would take the exact same class, he noted, the initiative might allow for a common writing education across a class year, for example. He mentioned that faculty were considering including quantitative skills as part of that first-year education as well.
The work to implement Swarthmore Forward is taking place while the college is also thinking about other questions to do with its academic future. Last week, The Phoenix reported on data that the Provost’s Office had requested from Institutional Effectiveness, Research & Assessment and sent to a group of faculty that showed an increase in the average grade given to students across divisions in the last twenty years. Wicentowski added that the Provost’s Office had presented the data at an all-chairs faculty meeting in the fall. “I shared the data with them, and I said, ‘Hey, here’s what we see.’ And I asked them to basically answer, ‘Do you think this is a problem?’”
Because of the large scope of that question, Wicentowski asked the chairs to first have conversations within their departments before a follow-up meeting planned for Friday, April 17, to hear how those discussions have gone. He emphasized that Swarthmore has never had a college-wide grading policy and again described his role on the issue as more of a facilitator of conversation. Still, he did mention the concern that if grades go up in general, employers and graduate schools will have less ability to differentiate between students. And, he brought up some of the hypotheses that many have raised, including the possibility that junior faculty are feeling pressured into giving better grades and that the rise in the portion of grades that are A+ is a response to the need for a new way to differentiate students as grade averages go up. “None of these things, I think, could be the only answer, because the effect is a little bit too pronounced [for there only to be one reason.]”
“I think we’re all aware of [the rise in average grades], but some are more concerned than others. And again, in the spirit of listening rather than dictating, I think it’s important for me to hear where faculty are on this before deciding anything, because it would be a real change to have the Provost’s Office make a policy about that.”
Similarly, while a Phoenix poll of the faculty in the fall found generally high approval of the Provost’s Office and the President’s Office, it also showed that only a quarter of faculty respondents felt that community and collaboration were at all strong, and over 60% felt it was at least somewhat worse than it had been in the past. Regarding possible divisions among the faculty, Wicentowski again voiced hope that his communication style would be a step in the right direction.
“I want to be able to listen to people, talk to people, invite them in, hear what they have to say, and work with them and support them. And faculty who feel like I’m not doing a great job, I think, have had lots of opportunities to come and tell me that, and I don’t shy away from that,” he said. “I’m hopeful that in being able to keep talking to people, there’s more trust in me. And then if there’s more trust in a common set of goals and aims, maybe that brings people together.”
While the Provost’s Office does provide programming to bring together faculty who might not otherwise interact much, Wicentowski noted that these initiatives were optional, and that he didn’t intend to force professors to participate.
As a representative of the faculty on the President’s Staff, Wicentowski is responsible for supporting faculty governance. In response to a question that cited The Phoenix poll’s observation that only 20% of faculty saw faculty as having an at all large amount of governance over decision making, and that 60% saw this amount as less than in the past, Wicentowski expressed a different view. He said that even before he was provost, he didn’t necessarily feel that there had been a decrease in faculty input.
“It’s possible that the things that I wanted to get involved with were areas where faculty were given more leeway, and other areas there were not,” he said, also noting that he understood that shaping the student Code of Conduct was one area from which some faculty had felt excluded. Again, though, he felt hopeful that these concerns were slowly being addressed, citing the faculty committee formed to review the Code of Conduct, as well as the recently-created Government Affairs Task Force.
Discussing the overall future of the college’s academic program and higher education at large, Wicentowski mentioned he thinks a lot about artificial intelligence, both as a computer scientist and as provost. “I imagine that that’s going to be a huge driver in how we’re thinking about what college looks like in ten years. And one of the problems with AI is that every day you wake up and it [requires] a different answer. So I think that’s made it challenging for a lot of places to adapt or think about how they should work.”
He noted that Swarthmore has recently created a committee of faculty and staff to think about how AI will impact the college and how the college should respond. “I think answering those questions is going to have such a huge impact on what we look like in ten years that maybe it dwarfs everything else that we’re thinking about.”
While Wicentowski thinks that, at a minimum, all faculty should be clear about expectations and guidelines for AI usage in their syllabi, he’d be hesitant to tell professors how to either incorporate or resist AI in their classes. About a college-wide policy, of which a plurality of Phoenix poll respondents were in favor, Wicentowski noted, “I have a way of thinking about this that’s very computer science focused. And I don’t really want to tell someone in the English department, ‘That’s how you should think about doing this.’” Again, he said he wants to hear what faculty across the college are thinking about this topic before beginning to address it with their recommendations in mind.
These are only some of the questions that Wicentowski and other campus leaders are thinking about as the college enters a period of transition. As for big-picture initiatives, Wicentowski mentioned that he does contribute to the strategic direction of the college’s academic program. “I have a voice in [that], and I can let people know what [my voice] is,” he said.
Still, while different provosts might approach voicing that in different ways, Wicentowski feels that it’s unlikely that any provost would be able to get their whole vision accomplished. “So you just have to listen to what people are saying and where they want to be, and then work within that,” he said.
