Nathan Urban Installed as Provost

At a late morning ceremony held outdoors near Iacocca Hall and Building C, Nathan Urban was formally installed as Lehigh’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

President John Simon ’19P delivered the event’s introductory remarks, highlighting Urban’s accomplishments as a neurobiologist and his tenure at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the vice provost for graduate studies and strategic initiatives before coming to Lehigh.

“Usually you can only speak to promise when you install a new administrator at a university,” remarked Simon. “However, with a year under his belt, I can actually speak to Nathan’s accomplishments. Nathan has led our academic enterprise. He’s navigated, let us say, some very unique challenges we have faced. And while he had the disadvantage of beginning his Lehigh career in the middle of a global pandemic, his calm demeanor and clear-eyed assessment of the landscape helped ensure that Lehigh would continue to fulfill its educational mission while safeguarding the health of our campus and local community.”

Urban shared heartfelt thanks to members of the community across the university and his family. He also spoke to the university’s mission and the importance of preparing today’s students to innovate and shape our country and the world into future decades.

“One of the most important things I’ve learned in my time in academia is the importance of asking the right questions. And I bring this to the provost role here at Lehigh,” he said. “A famous example of the importance of posing the right question comes from the history of science—specifically discovered by Johannes Kepler in the 1600s—that, based on the optics of the eye, the image [of the world] that we see in front of us is actually inverted on the back of our eye, on our retina. So the retinal image is upside down. The sky is on the bottom, the ground at the top.

“The true measures of our success often take years to be fully realized,” Urban continued. “This is why we need to constantly return to our principles and our mission. I see Lehigh as a place that can and should play a big role in shaping the future by educating our future leaders and innovators and by developing ideas and innovations that influence our economy and our society. … I think that to accomplish these goals, we need to choose to be an institution that leads and innovates in higher education.

“We need to choose to be a university that teaches students and gives them opportunities to learn from their experience and from each other—knowing that the specific outcomes of such learning through experience may be somewhat outside of our control. We need to choose to be a place that invests in creating an environment in which bold ideas are generated and analyzed and can solve the problems of today and tomorrow. We need to choose to take these steps that put us on the path to the future that we want to create. So let’s go to work.”

Urban succeeds Pat Farrell, who was Lehigh’s provost for 11 years and is currently finishing his sabbatical before returning to the faculty.