Early in my career, I knew a provost who delayed applying for provost roles for years. She had skills and credentials in abundance. However, as she put it, she liked people to like her. She worried the job would require a kind of emotional hardening. “I don’t have thick skin,” she admitted, as if that settled the matter.
At the time, I took that as a vulnerability, probably even a gendered one. Now, after serving as a provost myself, I hear it differently. She didn’t fear leadership; it was the myth we tell about leadership: surviving in senior academic administration requires emotional armor.
In higher education, we talk a lot about the need for “thick skin.” We tell aspiring provosts to brace themselves: for faculty anger, student disappointment, donor and parental pressure, and the steady drip of emails that arrive already convinced of your bad faith. Thick skin is framed as a prerequisite for the job. If you don’t have it, the assumption goes, you won’t last.
But thick skin and resilience aren’t the same. Thick skin is about deflection. It is the capacity to not be offended, to let criticism bounce off, to remain unmoved by negativity. In some contexts, this can be useful. A provost who takes every sharp email personally will burn out quickly. Thick skin can help you navigate social media pile-ons, anonymous complaints, and criticism that is more performative than substantive.
Resilience operates differently. Resilience is less about what fails to reach you and more about what moves through you. A resilient provost absorbs impact, processes it, and keeps going, not unchanged, but intact. In some cases, that provost is even a catalyst for conflict–knowing that the solutions sometimes involve that same airing of grievances. However, where thick skin minimizes feeling, resilience allows feeling, just not at the expense of derailing purpose.
This distinction matters because the work of a provost really isn’t about deflecting criticism. It is about making consequential decisions in environments of ambiguity, scarcity, and deep institutional attachment. You are asked to sit with faculty whose positions are being eliminated, students whose expectations simply cannot be met, and staff exhausted by constant change. You are often the face of decisions you did not unilaterally make but must fully own.
Thick skin alone is poorly suited to this work. Armor may protect, but it also distances. When leaders rely too heavily on it, they risk sliding into indifference, confusing emotional detachment with professionalism. Faculty and staff can sense it. They know when their grief, anger, or fear is being met with an impermeable surface instead of a human presence.
Resilience, by contrast, requires engagement. It means you are going in, not just standing on the sidelines. It involves acknowledging hurt, your own and others’, and still choosing forward motion. A resilient provost may go home after a brutal day and feel the weight of decisions made and words absorbed. She may take a solemn moment before sending an email that will change the course of someone’s career. And she can still sleep hard at night. The next morning, she returns clear-eyed, not because the pain didn’t register, but precisely because it was acknowledged.
This difference is crucial. Ignoring pain does not make it disappear; it often relocates it, showing up as cynicism, withdrawal, or burnout. And with the average tenure of a provost now at 4.6 years, few can make this a long-term approach. Resilience, while harder to cultivate, supports longevity. It asks leaders to metabolize difficulty rather than simply deflect it. Thick skin can be a component of resilience, but resilience is broader, deeper, more reflective, and, I argue, ultimately, more constructive.
Looking back, I wonder what might have happened if that provost-to-be had been told something different earlier in her career. Not that she needed to toughen up, but that she could remain someone who cared about being liked and still be effective. That caring, supported by resilience rather than armor, is not a liability. It is a resource.
Higher education does not need more kevlar-coated leaders who feel nothing. It needs leaders who can feel deeply and still move institutions forward. If we want more people to step into provost roles, especially those who lead with empathy and integrity, we should stop telling them to grow thicker skin. We should be teaching them how to stay whole in the midst of strain.
That is resilience.
