Cheryl Misak is a longtime professor and administrator at U of T. A member of the university’s philosophy department, she has held top admin posts at UTM and the St. George campus. Now, with VP and provost Vivek Goel departing, Misak is gearing up to take on U of T’s senior academic post. The Varsity caught up with her one wet and chilly morning.
I show up at Simcoe Hall just in time to carry Cheryl Misak’s things for her. Misak, who has just been appointed to U of T’s second-highest office, leans out of her car and propels herself upright, steadying herself on a pair of crutches on the slushy ground. Then she hands me a book and what looks like a goldfish bag full of ice cubes and freezing water.
The cold bag, I gather, is for her right knee, held slightly bent in an impressive leg brace thanks to a nasty tennis injury. On our slow way up the stairs, Misak boasts that she’ll be walking crutch-free by the time she returns from an upcoming trip to a conference in Cape Town.
Misak’s appointment was announced last week just after U of T confirmed that Vivek Goel, U of T’s VP and provost for the past four years, will be leaving to head the new Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion. As his interim replacement,
Misak will be U of T’s top dog for all matters academic and budgetary when she takes office in July. Misak’s husband is from South Africa, though they met in grad school at Oxford. Both of them decided they wanted to teach at U of T—and made it to tenured positions here, together, in under a decade. Some people.
In recent years, Misak—whose field is American philosophy—is spending more time handling administrative matters at increasingly higher levels. “I’ve found myself drifting closer and closer to central administration in the last 10 years. I enjoy it very much but also still enjoy philosophy and try to keep my hand in,” she said.
After acting as principal of UTM for a year, and then serving as acting dean at that campus, Misak moved downtown this fall to help fill in for departing VP students Dave Farrar. When Farrar left, his portfolio was divided into two separate positions
“I took over a slice of [Farrar’s] portfolio,” Misak modestly insists when we reach her office. The room is dominated by a massive black painting covering an entire wall. Dimly brushed in the foreground is what appears to be a Greek amphitheatre fl oating in space, with a greyhound, or some kind of weasel, running circles around it forever.
“Isn’t that hideous?” she chimes in. “I think it’s about Sisyphus or something else about the futility of life.”
It might sound a bit glib, but Misak’s chain of “acting” or “interim” administration jobs make her career seem unsettled. “The interim propositions are always vague. I believe the appointment is for a year or until a provost is found,” she says. “The deputy provost position I’ve got for another four years.”
Misak’s upcoming provostial term may be temporary, but she’ll be stepping into a number of ongoing disputes. To mention one, the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students is fighting an administrative order that it vacate its current office space in the Margaret Fletcher building, slated for demolition to make way for the proposed (and hotly debated) Centre for High-Performance Sport. At the most recent Governing Council meeting, Goel took the unusual step of circulating a public letter to APUS in which he charged that they had known all along that the building’s days were numbered.
Misak was, understandably, not anxious to comment on the issue: “What I think I need to say about that is, let’s see how that unfolds over the next few months,” she said. “I will inherit that and a number of ongoing situations and take stock when I take the position on July 1.”
Eager to look forward she may not be, but Misak is quick to point to her history as an administrator. “When I was dean at UTM, I put together a dean’s advisory committee. We had students in there, we had some of the best teachers, we had chairs of departments—so we all sat down together and asked what we could do in a concrete way to improve the student experience.”
The committee resulted in 28 separate pilot projects that, over four years, introduced writing components to programs whose students, like UTM’s math undergrads, felt their academic writing instruction was somewhat lacking.
“There are also things like student space, that…that’s a more general umbrella thing, right?” she says. “It’d be great if we could have a student commons. We need to do that kind of thing as well: from the bottom up, you get ‘a thousand different flowers blooming,’ and also from the top down you get some of these big projects off the ground.”
July 1 is a day to watch for at U of T, then. “All articulation of all views,” Misak promises, laughing. Before then, it’ll be tough to pin her down.
When I ask Misak to weigh in on Area Studies—regionally-focused programs like American or African studies which are pushing U of T to give them more resources and attention—she waxes a bit philosophical about academic flexibility and emerging disciplines, and then stops and smacks both palms on the desk in front of me.
“But, boy, the dean of Arts and Science would not be happy if the provost made comments on this,” she exclaims. “The short answer is, Arts and Science is working this out!”
Ask her about ancillary fees, a contentious issue that Ontario student unions are currently suing over, and again: “I really need to see how these things unfold, and July 1 is when I’ll be a full participant on these files.” It was worth a try.
If Misak is reluctant to go on the record with her views on the challenges ahead, it’s not a lack of enthusiasm keeping her in check. Look for her come July—she’ll be the one jogging up the steps at Simcoe Hall.
