The book provides case studies for reflection in a broad array of situations that that provosts must deal with. The short scenarios and case studies are useful for thinking about problems or issues in advance and considering options that might be available. When analyzing circumstances, readers may find it useful to identify setting aspects that apply to their institutions. While there are differences in involvement, actions and outcomes, each case provides multiple connectors and situational insights for a provost. The book presents tips on deciding to become a provost, interviewing successfully, and managing the "honeymoon" period in a new position. It addresses challenges unique to the provost, such as balancing academic and institutional priorities or leading from a perspective of diversity. Questions on assessing the "fit" of your team and creating a shared vision of academic affairs are probed through example. Collaborations across other divisions of the university and the provost's role in shared governance guide the reader to examine how to lead change. Leading change is having a vision for the academy and provosts are agents of power outside of their own institutions who shape the dialog of future higher education.

The book provides case studies for reflection in a broad array of situations that that provosts must deal with. The short scenarios and case studies are useful for thinking about problems or issues in advance and considering options that might be available. When analyzing circumstances, readers may find it useful to identify setting aspects that apply to their institutions. While there are differences in involvement, actions and outcomes, each case provides multiple connectors and situational insights for a provost. The book presents tips on deciding to become a provost, interviewing successfully, and managing the "honeymoon" period in a new position. It addresses challenges unique to the provost, such as balancing academic and institutional priorities or leading from a perspective of diversity. Questions on assessing the "fit" of your team and creating a shared vision of academic affairs are probed through example. Collaborations across other divisions of the university and the provost's role in shared governance guide the reader to examine how to lead change. Leading change is having a vision for the academy and provosts are agents of power outside of their own institutions who shape the dialog of future higher education.

Shortlisted in the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020. Travel writer and journalist Gail Simmons follows in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson as she walks from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to Tring in Hertfordshire via Great Missenden and Wendover, tracing not only the changes in the landscape of the last 150 years but also those yet to come with the imminent arrival of the controversial HS2, the high-speed railway from London to Birmingham. Just as Stevenson spoke to people he met along the way, Simmons encounters those whose lives will be affected by HS2: a tenant farmer, a retired businessman-turned-campaigner, a landscape historian and a conservationist. In the autumn of 1874 a young, unknown travel writer called Robert Louis Stevenson walked from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to Tring in Hertfordshire. He wrote up his three-day journey across the Chiltern Hills in an essay titled In the Beechwoods, penned a decade before he found fame as the author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson observed the natural world, reflecting on the experience of walking across this landscape at a time when England was still largely agrarian and when most people still earned their living from working the land. During his walk he was accompanied by a 'carolling of larks' that was so integral to his journey he 'could have baptized it "The Country of Larks" '. Almost 150 years later Simmons walks across the same landscape, observing the loss of flora, fauna and the whole rural way of life, replaced by commuters and dormitory villages, a trend portrayed by John Betjeman in Metro-land (1973), which described suburban life alongside the Metropolitan Railway. Divided into three parts to parallel Stevenson's journey the book offers a detailed, almost forensic, examination of this distinctive landscape of English chalk downland interwoven with recollections from Simmons of growing up in a Chilterns commuter village. 'I might have left long ago' she says, 'but this place still matters to me'.

RAYNOR WINN: 'I loved this memoir - centuries of stories captured in the chalk, all told through the prism of one life.' An old map. A lost pilgrimage route. A journey in search of our walking heritage. When Henry VIII banned pilgrimage in 1538, he ended not only a centuries-old tradition of walking as an act of faith, but a valuable chance to discover the joy of walking as an escape from the burdens of everyday life. Much was lost when these journeys faded from our collective memory, but clues to our past remain. On an antique map in Oxford's Bodleian Library, a faint red line threading through towns and villages between Southampton and Canterbury suggests a significant, though long-forgotten, road. Renamed the Old Way, medieval pilgrims are thought to have travelled this route to reach the celebrated shrine of Thomas Becket. Described as England's Camino, this long-distance footpath carves through one of the nation's most iconic landscapes - one that links prehistoric earthworks, abandoned monasteries, Saxon churches, ruined castles and historic seaports. Over four seasons, travel writer Gail Simmons walks the Old Way to rediscover what a long journey on foot offers us today. In the age of the car, what does it mean to embrace 'slow travel'? Why does being a woman walking alone still feel like a radical act? In an age when walking connects the nation, can we now reclaim pilgrimage as a secular act? Winding 240 miles between the chalk hills and shifting seascapes of the south coast, Gail ventures deep into our past, exploring this lost path and telling a story of kings and knights, peasants and pilgrims, of ancient folklore and modern politics. Blending history, anthropology, etymology and geology, Gail's walk along the Old Way reveals the rich natural and cultural heritage found on our own doorstep.