Pathologically Genuine: A Banana Slug in the Mojave Desert.

I was accused, for the first time, of being crazy. Was I?

I read the words, “Shame on you for hiring a crazy provost who is under psychiatric evaluation.”

My jaw dropped before I had time to think about it.

It was 2018. I was 58 years old and into my second year as provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Arkansas.

Most people have no idea what a provost does. A dictionary will tell you a provost can be a prison keeper, a Scottish magistrate, a dignitary of a cathedral, or a high-ranking administrator at a university. On any given day I could feel like any of the four.

My main role was to oversee the academic mission of a university with 30,000 students, more than 1,500 faculty, and an academic budget approaching $400 million.

Some days I felt like a magistrate keeping different parts of the bureaucracy from crashing into each other like two cars entering an intersection without traffic lights or stop signs.

Other days, the cathedral analogy felt right. University campuses are sacred places to me and I see higher education as a spiritual calling. Lives are transformed. The University of Arkansas recognizes the power of higher education by engraving the name of every student who ever graduated in its sidewalks.

And there were days where the prison analogy seemed apt. Anyone who has ever been a student, or a teacher, has imagined administrators as evil wardens.

King Charles I issued an edict in 1643 that is connected to the prison keeper analogy, “The Provost must have a horse allowed him and some soldiers to attend him, and all the rest commanded to obey and assist, or else the service will suffer, for he is but one man and must correct many, and therefore he cannot be beloved.”

This metaphor might explain why the average tenure of provosts in 2026 is three years or less. There is too much to correct.

The edict shared an unfortunate truth with me that day -he cannot be beloved.

The chancellor asked me to come over to his office. His office suite was connected to mine by a narrow hallway with dim lighting, worn wood paneling, and a yellow-green carpet that survived the 1970s and gave me headaches. Although we had a strong working relationship, it was rare for the chancellor to summon me outside of a scheduled meeting. So, when he asked me to walk through the hallway from my provost’s office, I started sweating and wished that I had remembered to use my antiperspirant.

I am almost always uncomfortable wearing dress shirts, a tie, and dress shoes. I was as uncomfortable then as I was the day after I walked through a field of grass and woke up covered in chigger bites. It is still not clear to me why I wanted a job where I could not dress for comfort in baggy t-shirts, worn jeans and sneakers.

I casually walked over to the chancellor’s office through the tortured hallway and greeted his executive assistant and his chief of staff with a hearty smile and my recognizable laugh.

I stepped into his cavernous office, large enough to even have its own private bathroom, and walked over to the large traditional wood desk that faces the door where he was sitting. The desk screams out to visitors, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Even so, our meetings were always casual when he was behind the desk. If we had to discuss something important or difficult, we usually sat at a table, which I imagined really bugged the desk.

He wasted no time and gently said, “Jim, you need to see this.” He was holding a two-page document with maybe twenty bullet points. Each bullet point was directed at him and started with the phrase Shame on you. The author was anonymous.

The chancellor had received several anonymous letters before this one. Each was filled with complaints and accusations. He told me that the animosity was so strong it was amazing that the letters didn’t spontaneously catch fire. He never shared those letters with me, though. He told me later that he wanted me to see this particular letter so I could understand just how combustible the cultural climate was for both of us.

I read and absorbed each bullet point until I got to one toward the end that stopped me in my tracks: Shame on you for hiring a crazy provost who is under psychiatric evaluation.

I finished reading the letter, but something in me had shifted. My shoulders sagged, and I could feel the weight of sadness settling in. I left his office in cognitive fog.

I walked across the hallway into Laura’s (chancellor’s chief of staff) office. Laura’s office had a different vibe than the chancellor’s. It was small with no bathroom. She also had a traditional wood desk facing the door, but it was genetically different than the chancellor’s desk. Visitors would be welcomed by Laura’s desk as if it were saying “Be calm and come on in.”

I almost always went into her office after every meeting with the chancellor to debrief and make sure we were aligned in our priorities. I needed something else this time, emotional support.

There was a chair sideways to the desk rather than facing it, so it was not intimidating to sit in the chair. I walked in and sat down.

As I started talking, I began touching and rubbing my face and forehead. I did this often, sometimes unknowingly. Colleagues occasionally asked if I had a migraine headache or a sinus infection when they saw me do this in a meeting or in the audience for a presentation. But that was not the cause. I would rub or tickle my face and/or forehead at times when I was tired, stressed, or just needed to meditate. The sensory stimulation made it easier for thoughts to just pass through my mind like a slowly moving river, rather than just pooling in a stagnant pond. I needed my thoughts to keep moving.

Laura had not seen the Shame on you letter. When I told her about the line, her jaw appeared to drop. Even her desk sank a bit into the floor. Her reaction was immediate, unfiltered, and a clean summary of the situation.

“What the hell?”

I walked back down the hallway shaking my head back to my office. I stopped by Kathy’s desk (my executive assistant) before entering my office. Kathy compensated for every flaw I had as a provost,

Kathy is also one of the most unflappable people that I know. Someone could come running into our office being chased by a pack of angry pit bulls, and all Kathy would need to do is look up, send a message through her eyes that said “Will you stop? I don’t need this crap right now,” and the dog pack would stop in its track and whimper their way out of the office. Then she would say to you, in a matter-of-fact voice, “everything’s fine” and you’d believe her because it was true.

I told Kathy about the letter. She shook her head with a wry smile as if to say, “there are way too many stupid people in the world,” and then said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Well… that’s something” her way of expressing outrage in the professional setting of a provost office..

Later that evening I drove home to a house that never really felt like a fit. It was large and an objectively beautiful. French Tudor style, two acres of grass, overlooking the White River, with a saltwater pool and a mahogany wine room designed to hold thousands of bottles. We never had more than twenty or so bottles of wine in it, but sometimes we stored food like a stray bag of potatoes there, too.

The house was in a gated community -the gate actually worked most of the time. We didn’t like living in a gated community. My father was a civil rights leader when I was growing up, so the notion of excluding people from our neighborhood made me feel guilty every time I left or returned to the neighborhood.

I also feel that living behind gates, or having window blinds closed, is like being imprisoned. It is much more important to me to be able see out or get out than it is to keep others from looking or coming in.

I was always greeted when I returned home by our Bichon Frise, Halley, as if I had just returned after 40 years wandering in the desert. Halley’s joy was unfiltered. Full body wagging, jumping, and lots of kisses. Being welcomed into the pack where I belonged melted most of the day’s stress. Without dogs in my life, I might never have known what it felt like to belong

I felt misunderstood and that I never belonged in Arkansas. It was as if I was transplanted into the wrong place like a banana slug adapted to the cool, wet environment of a redwood forest finding itself in the dry, hot Mojave Desert with no evolutionary tools to navigate the environment.

Neither the chancellor nor I were Arkansan and were considered Yankees by Southerners. That was a reason for many to be suspicious of us. I was also not accustomed to navigating southern culture. Southerners often use polite words to say harsh things. People warned me that hearing someone say, “Bless your heart” in a gentle Southern accent was the equivalent of being screamed at with a four-letter word in New York.

In fact, I tend to take what people say literally. For example, my wife, Adele, and I were at a restaurant in Arkansas where there were problems in the kitchen. I asked the waitress how long the food would be. She answered, “It will be a minute.” I thought that meant we’d get our food in a minute or two. Adele had to educate me that “in a minute” translates to “It might be a few hours” in the South.

Trusting people always has been my default, at least until someone gave me reasons not to trust them. So, if someone greeted me with a smile and a hearty handshake, I assumed they were sincerely glad to see me. I wouldn’t even notice they were sliding a pocketknife into my abdomen.

I realized there were serious consequences for my genuine and naïve trust that day.

It also became apparent that I wasn’t just misunderstood.

I was accused, for the first time, of being crazy. Was I?

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