Prabu David, a longtime administrator currently serving multiple high-level roles in MSU’s leadership, will leave the university next month to become Rochester Institute of Technology’s new provost, RIT announced.
David has been simultaneously working as the dean of the college of communication, vice provost for faculty and academic staff development and interim vice provost for teaching and learning innovation.
He also served as a member of the recently assembled committee tasked with finding MSU’s next president.
Trustee Dennis Denno, the committee’s chair, said that the committee is “not planning on a replacement” to fill David’s seat, which would bring the total size down to 28 members, with one less administration representative.
David previously served on the 2019 search committee that selected MSU’s last president, Samuel L. Stanley Jr, who resigned last year over a loss of confidence in the university’s board.
Seeing Stanley’s short tenure was discouraging for David, who said “we thought he was a wonderful president when we brought him here and he did the work we expected him to do.”
For David's deanship, MSU has already appointed advertising department chairperson Teresa Mastin as interim. A permanent replacement will soon be selected by a search committee with final approval by the Board of Trustees, a university spokesperson said.
David’s role as vice provost for faculty and academic staff development will be reworked, with the new vice provost for faculty and academic staff affairs absorbing the oversight of training for MSU’s faculty and academic staff.
His recent interim post as vice provost for teaching and learning innovation – where David worked to develop policies surrounding the use of AI softwares like ChatGPT in MSU’s classrooms – will be filled by a second interim until applications can be solicited for a permanent replacement, a provost spokesperson said.
Asked why he would leave MSU, David said that he had already been eyeing roles in central administration when RIT contacted him about being their next provost. He said he was looking for a position that would give him more responsibility in “the creation of value” for students who he worries see declining value in higher education, and that the RIT job fit that desire.
“Why would anybody want to go to higher education if you can get some credentials from Google and be a data scientist and make a lot of money, what is the point of getting a four-year degree?” David said. “That’s the key value proposition … [we need to be] developing people, and values, and ethics. Things that can’t be done in a vacuum but have to happen in the whole community.”
Despite the exciting opportunity to “oversee a whole university, and try the ideas we’ve tried in ComArts at a bigger scale,” David says he’s just now realizing what he’ll miss most about MSU.
“While we’re here, we don't realize the strengths and values MSU really stands for,” David said. “When we talk about access and land grant, we mention them, but we don’t really internalize them. So now just as I’m leaving, I look back and see those things are very special.”
David, who previously worked and studied at Ohio State University and the University of North Carolina, said moving to a much smaller, division-three school like RIT will be a “big transition.”
