Faculty Forum-I Seem to Be a Preposition

By Edwin L. Battistella

After a year’s sabbatical, I had planned to be teaching this year. But when our provost accepted a presidency, I found myself delaying my return to the classroom to serve as interim provost. I prepared by debriefing the departing provost; consulting with the president, vice presidents, and deans; and asking faculty and staff for advice. I refreshed myself with key planning documents, located the restroom, and made lots of lists. I became curious about just what a provost was.

The academic title provost goes back a couple of centuries, but even earlier had church, civil, and military uses. The ecclesiastical provost was a high priest, like a deacon or dean. The French royal provosts were minor judges and the Scottish town provost was a ceremonial civil leader. And in England, and later the United States, the military provost marshal was in charge of upholding rules among the troops.

Should I be a priest, judge, figurehead, or police officer? I turned toetymology, learning that provost comes from Latin praeponere, “top lace in front,” so it is related to the word preposition. Here was information I could use. A provost is like a preposition.

This simile makes sense when you think about what prepositions do—link words, signal relationships, and organize the larger scheme of the sentence. They indicate time, space, motion, and reason. They form prepositional phrases, the grammatical equivalent of university committees.

Like prepositions, provosts bring ideas, people, places, and things together. Like the prepositions to, from, by, and in, provosts allocate resources and identify deadlines. Like with, provosts build cooperation (collaborate with) or manage conflict (negotiate with). Like of and except, provosts can delineate (the recommendation of the faculty) and waive (except for transfer students).

Prepositions are not necessary for every sentence, of course, but it’s hard to imagine expressions of much complexity or subtlety without them. If we take the prepositional phrases out of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural challenge, we are left with Ask not what your country can do but what you can do, which is far less stirring. Prepositions and provosts can remind us that actions are for some beneficiary and some purpose.

Thinking of provosts as prepositions also reinforces what provosts are not. Provosts are not mere coordinating conjunctions. They must implement, prioritize, direct, and clarify roles. And provosts are also not subordinating conjunctions, l inking from outside. They must b ein the thick of the clause, complementing, clarifying, and organizing.

Sentences do not revolve around prepositions, of course, and universities do not revolve around provosts. The central grammatical roles are played by nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. A university’s students and faculty are its nouns. Students and faculty can be mass or count, individual or plural, abstract or concrete, proper or common. They are sometimes agents, sometimes acted upon, and they can be pronominal as well—personal, reflexive, reciprocal, possessive, and demonstrative.

The role of the verb falls to the institution’s purpose, the state of being without which there is fragmentation. Some institutions are active, others passive, and some simply are, and the purpose of an institution is sometimes articulated as its mission (present tense), vision (future tense), or values (past tense).

Our communities are like adjectives and adverbs, expanding our purpose and amplifying the work of students and faculty. Eloquent neighbors, partners, and alumni add depth and distinctiveness. But too many modifiers, coupled with weak verbs, create anguished sentences in which the modifiers overpower all else (Scowling grimly, he moved slowly toward us, hands clenched tightly).

If students, faculty, purpose, and community are the content words, administrators and support staff are the grammatical glue. We are the conjunctions, quantifiers, intensifiers, helping verbs, and question words. Without content words, academe is meaningless. Without function words, it is aphasic.

I think being a preposition will be interesting work. I’ll try to complement verbs, disambiguate nouns, construct phrases that modify and balance the whole, and keep words from bumping into each other. After all,  the following year I’ll be a noun again myself. For now though, being a preposition is something up for which I certainly am.

Edwin L. Battistella is professor in the English and writing department and interim provost at Southern Oregon University.

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