Christopher P. Long

Biography

Christopher P. Long is the Provost and Senior Vice President and Collins Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Recognized for values-enacted leadership, Provost Long is committed to the transformative power of liberal arts research and teaching by enriching graduate and undergraduate education, recruiting and retaining world-class faculty, and creating new opportunities for leading-edge research.

Provost Long joined the university in June 2024. He has more than 20 years of academic leadership experience from the public research universities of Michigan State University and Penn State. He identifies integrity, trust, equity, collaboration, and excellence as the core values that inform his leadership as the chief academic officer at the University of Oregon. As provost, he is responsible for the programs, policies, and priorities that shape the university's academic life. Working collaboratively with leadership across the university, the Office of the Provost leads efforts to ensure that students, staff, and faculty can flourish in an environment that cultivates excellence through diversity, belonging, responsible inquiry, trust, and dialogue.

The provost reports to the president of the university and, in his absence, acts on behalf of the president. As chief academic officer, the provost serves as the spokesperson for academic matters at the university.

Provost Long has more than $8 million of funded research projects, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Values-Enacted Leadership Institute, to support a collaborative approach to institutional change that puts values at the center of decision-making, policy creation, and daily practice; the Mellon funded Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership with the Big 10 Academic Alliance, a participatory research initiative and teaching framework developed in reciprocal partnership with Indigenous communities and institutions across the Big 10; the Public Philosophy Journal, an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues; HuMetricsHSS, a values-enacted initiative committed to transforming higher education by aligning indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values; and VELI - Values-Enacted Leadership Institute, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

An expert in both ancient Greek and contemporary continental philosophy, Provost Long’s extensive publication record include four books: The Ethics of Ontology (SUNY 2004), Aristotle On the Nature of Truth (Cambridge 2010), Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading (Cambridge 2014), and Reiner Schürmann and the Poetics of Politics (Punctum 2018).

Prior to joining the UO he was dean of both the College of Arts & Letters and Honors College at Michigan State University where he was a Research Foundation Professor of Philosophy. Before that, he was the associate dean for graduate and undergraduate education and a professor of philosophy and classics in the College of the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University. Provost Long received his MA and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in New York and BA from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.

To learn more about Provost Long’s administrative approach, his research, and his academic life, visit his website: cplong.org or engage with him on Mastodon at https://hcommons.social/@cplong.