Leading the Charge

University provosts are institutions’ chief academic officers, guiding educational offerings for students and development and hiring efforts for faculty. As the second-highest level of leadership at a university, the people appointed to these positions — including UCF’s Michael D. Johnson — are experts in building a strategic vision and determining how to achieve it.

While Johnson — who started at UCF 35 years ago as an assistant professor supporting the new physics doctoral program — certainly has the wisdom and keen foresight of a senior academic administrator, he considers himself a student and servant to UCF. That service will be complete this summer when he retires.

“I’ve had this remarkable set of opportunities to do things that are really interesting. And I’ve had almost no opportunity to get bored,” says Johnson, who was dean of the College of Sciences from 2011 to 2020. “I’ve been learning new things all the time and, I hope, doing good things for the university. I certainly tried.”

While Johnson spends a lot of time meeting with people across the university and speaking at various events, the self-proclaimed introvert spends even more time listening to faculty, chairs and deans about where UCF should be heading and how he can help remove hurdles to get there.

“People expect us to help students get good first jobs out of college and have good careers. That’s our duty and it’s part of our mission. But it’s not all of our mission,” he says. “A lot of what I’ve done is thinking about how to invest money that the state has generously invested in UCF, which ultimately means who should we hire. They’ve invested with us explicitly to help strengthen engineering and technology because of their significance to the state of Florida.”

“And when we carry out our obligation to support the public good, and we do support the public good, it becomes opportunities for us to become great,” he says.

“I’ve seen this university develop from a regional institution into something that’s really playing on a high level across all of higher education.” — Michael D. Johnson, provost

Johnson has witnessed UCF’s evolution as Florida’s Premier Engineering and Technology University parallel the growth of related industries and partner companies, like Lockheed Martin and Electronic Arts, around Central Florida. While excellence in STEM continues to be a hallmark of UCF, he knows from a faculty and administrative level — and for the benefit of all students — that every discipline contributes to the strength of one another and Knight Nation as a whole.

“I believe taking advantage of the university’s technology focus, where it makes sense, will help each academic area leap past programs at other universities, and develop into something unique and excellent on the national landscape,” he says.

That level of impact and growing reputation, Johnson notes, is partially tied to UCF’s location in one of America’s most dynamic and economically robust cities, providing competitive advantages over older institutions across Florida and the nation. It’s part of the reason he came to UCF decades ago.

“Over the years we’ve harnessed growth to improve our quality and expand our mission,” Johnson says. “I’ve seen this university develop from a regional institution into something that’s really playing on a high level across all of higher education. UCF is becoming one of the best universities in the country. It’s just been an incredible trajectory.”

Learn more about Johnson and his plans after retirement.

You’re emphatic about your love for teaching. Did you ever imagine you would trade in that profession to become a leader at a university?
I was totally tongue-tied as a young person. I was very insecure in my first administrative job as an assistant, then associate, dean [of the College of Sciences]. And the only reason I ever contemplated continuing down that path is that is an older person pulled me aside and told me, “You would be a good dean.”

That caught me totally by surprise. It changed the course of my life. It caused me to think about something that I had never thought of as a path. And then it gave me some confidence to move in that direction later on. People don’t always realize how important their words can be to people starting out their careers.

How has your perspective shifted as you progressed from an assistant professor to administrative roles?
I have sincerely held opposite beliefs at different times in my career.

When I started out, I was thinking about myself, my career, my research, my teaching, all those “my”s. And that’s OK. It’s not easy to be a new faculty member. It’s really hard to develop good teaching and a healthy research career. It’s really hard — and significant — to earn tenure for those of us on the tenure track. So I understand all of that.

But of course, in a university, everything we do matters a great deal. And I learned better.

As a dean, your job is to develop every department. And when I became dean, the departments were at different levels of development, with different needs and opportunities. You have to develop a reasonable strategy for how to balance those and how to emphasize strategic priorities.

When I got these administrative jobs, it felt like I had been moving one arm for 20 years doing physics. And then I had to move my other arm and do something completely different. At first when I started teaching, it was the joy of learning and helping students. As my role changed, I came to gradually understand the real joy of the job is about helping others, faculty, researchers and staff, and the institution.

But even more than that, I entirely didn’t recognize the privilege of working in public higher education when I started out working here. In public higher education, we have this fantastic mission that I referred to about doing good for the public. It’s not our job to educate the smallest possible fraction of young people. It’s our job to educate as many from all walks of life as we can.

You became interim provost in 2020 when Alexander N. Cartwright was named president (and the “interim” was removed in January 2022). What was it like navigating this new responsibility during the pandemic?

The first year was really hard. Many people were very worried about being back in face-to-face education. That’s especially true of the faculty. That makes sense because we didn’t understand COVID-19 at the beginning. We came to understand that it’s much more dangerous for people as they got older. Not all diseases are like that, right? The Spanish flu in the early 20th century affected young people at a very high rate.

So a lot of faculty, even more than students, were very unhappy to be told they had to teach in-person again. That was hard to work through. So it didn’t feel normal for a long time. The last two-and-a-half years is when the president and I have been able to focus on where we are going as a university.

I would say we still feel the repercussions of the pandemic. We still are more scattered as a community and less pulled together than we were pre-COVID-19. It’s not that you can’t work from home, but part of the joy in your job is the people you’re with. And many of us have less of that than we did before the pandemic. It’s rebuilding, but it needs to be continued to be built.

A university is about people and it’s the best when its people are together.

UCF was founded as an engineering school and continues to excel in this area, as well as in technology. But UCF also excels in hospitality, healthcare, the sciences, education and more. Why is it important to invest in these fields alongside engineering and technology?

It’s an obvious thing that a university, in fact, has many parts. I think the path that’s going to help make this university continue to be great is this vision about engineering and technology. It absolutely does not mean that we should restrict our concerns to only technology fields — that would give students a terrible education.

When educating students, it’s also our obligation to help young adults become capable citizens in a democracy. And more than that, to provide opportunity to learn about the wonderful things that humankind has done over the centuries. And more than that, to help people understand the wonders of the world around them, whether it’s different people, the natural world or the arts.

It’s our obligation to educate, not just to prepare students for jobs. And I really care that both of those things happen. I don’t think I understood that when I started out. I hope all of us sort of understand differently as time goes on. I’d like to think better, but at least differently.

After 35 years of service at UCF, what are your plans for retirement?
I don’t have strong plans — I’ve been too busy to make them. But I know a couple things.
My wife and I play competitive bridge these days, and I would like to get as good at that as I possibly can.

Another is, I’m really annoyed that I live in Florida, and I can’t speak Spanish.
And I’ve been annoyed about that for about 20 years. So I’m trying to learn Spanish. My daughter lives in Miami, has two children and her husband’s family is from Peru. I’d like to be able to communicate with his family more.

So learning is all that I really know right now. I’m sure there will be more.