Listener, Learner, Traveler, Teacher: A Profile of the Provost
Most days, Ariel Armony walks to work.
He lives just east of Babson’s campus. As the morning begins, he bundles up for the weather and heads out, hiking through the nearby woods, past the deer and squirrels, past the campus of Olin College, before landing at Babson.
The walk takes about 15 minutes. If he’s in a hurry, he can do it in about 12, though if he’s in the right mood and has the time, he might take a detour or two to stretch it out longer. “It doesn’t matter what the weather looks like. I walk,” says Armony, who last fall started at Babson as the College’s new provost and executive vice president. “It is a great way to start the day.”
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After his day at Babson is over, Armony heads home through the woods, using a light to guide his way if the path is too dark. On the way, he ponders the concerns of the day. “When you leave the office, the problems in your head feel unresolvable,” he says. “By the time you get home, you see everything has a solution.”
Such is the power of walking. “When you walk, you think in a different way,” Armony says. “I tell students to go for walks. That’s where you find yourself.”
As provost, Armony serves as Babson’s chief academic officer, a role that’s critical in guiding Babson’s efforts to educate the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders. He brings to the position a leadership background in higher education and a lifetime of global experiences. He also brings curiosity, openness, and that penchant for walking and exploring.
Armony often likes to walk around Babson and take in this newest stop in his life’s journey. He listens to the different languages being spoken, sees the fliers advertising clubs, engages with faculty, says hello to students. “Babson has a level of energy that is unique. There is a lot of passion. I love to walk around campus just to feel it,” he says. “The students are discussing things. They are hanging out. There is intensity.”
A Global Citizen
Armony’s office sits on the third floor of Horn Library. He has traveled through much of the world, and his office reflects that, with masks, paintings, and other mementos from his trips hanging on the wall. “This space tells you a lot about me,” he says.
Traveling has been a way of life for him since he was a child. Armony grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and while his parents didn’t always have much money, they were committed to finding a way to travel. “With a lot of effort, they always tried to take us to different parts of the world,” he says.
The people and places he has seen have inspired Armony. In Nepal, for instance, he hiked the Himalayas, the mountains feeling so removed from the worries and noise of everyday life. “This is one of my favorite places to be,” he says. “It is just nature. It is you and the universe and nature. It is the most incredible thing.”
For a year, from 2008 to 2009, he lived in China as a Fulbright Scholar. He was amazed by the transformation of the country, in the change between generations. Parents who were peasants with barely any formal education were watching their children go off to college. “To see that change was remarkable,” Armony says.
When researching his first book, he took several days to travel to the hinterlands of Nicaragua, where he met people whose lives had been touched by years of war. “To get to know them, to know about their lives—that was a humbling experience,” he says.
The global mindset of Babson, its mission to prepare entrepreneurial leaders to create value for themselves, their communities, and the world, is a big reason Armony decided to come to the College. “I consider myself a global citizen,” Armony says. “We have a responsibility to think about the planet. We have a responsibility to think about others. We have a responsibility to the next generation. That makes you a global citizen.”
Before Babson, Armony worked for a decade at the University of Pittsburgh, where he most recently served as vice chancellor for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies. He’s proud of the impact he had at the center, by forging new international partnerships and deepening the university’s global reach, but he felt the moment was right to step down. “It is important to know when it is a good time to transition in a leadership position,” he says. “A good leader knows when it is time for the next person.”
He sought a new challenge, and Babson’s provost position, with its broad range of academic responsibilities, provided it. “It is really great when you have reached the top of the mountain you wanted to climb,” he says. “I was open to another opportunity and to climb another mountain.”
A Winding Path
Armony’s path up the mountain, from Argentina to academia in the U.S., has been a winding one. As a young man in his native country, he dwelled in the world of creativity and theater. He first harbored aspirations of being an actor, then tried his hand at playwriting and directing.
“I admire actors, but I didn’t see myself as someone who always said the words that someone else wrote,” he says. “I started to experiment with writing and directing. As a playwright, you are creating a world. As a director, you are bringing it to life. I thought this was more of who I am.”
Eventually finding that theater, especially the experimental, boundary-pushing theater that Armony favored, didn’t pay the bills, he gravitated toward journalism. He wrote opinion pieces for newspapers. He hosted a radio show on politics. The work appealed to his analytical side and his curiosity.
“I am by definition a curious person,” he says. “I love to learn, and you learn by meeting people, going to different places, experiencing different things, and always getting out of your comfort zone. That is important in learning.”
Then he started taking sociology classes, and the path of his life suddenly took a turn. “That opened a new world to me,” he says. In those classes, he studied democracy, socioeconomic issues, and the troubling political situation in Argentina, which was dealing with the aftermath of a ruthless dictatorship.
The challenging political and economic conditions in Argentina ultimately would convince Armony to leave the country. “I never thought I would leave Argentina, but things were really bad,” he says. “I was recently married. We needed to seek a future outside the country.”
He and his wife, Mirna Kolbowski, came to the U.S., where Armony earned a master’s degree in international affairs at Ohio University and then a PhD in political science from the University of Pittsburgh. Academic posts followed, at Colby College, the University of Miami, and finally back at the University of Pittsburgh. Along the way, he has published several books, including one on the interactions between China and Latin America and another on the rising global cities of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore. He and Kolbowski also started a family. They have two sons: Ian and Alan.
Through all those changes, Armony never forgot about Argentina. He and his family would visit often. When they were all with his mother-in-law, she would ask them, “¿Cómo estamos?” To her question asking how they were, they would reply “juntos,” or “together.”
Armony’s sons are now grown, and Alan, remembering those Argentina visits, got a tattoo with the word “juntos.” Ian and Armony decided to do the same. At first, the provost admits he was nervous about how painful the process might be, but the tattoo that now sits on his upper shoulder feels heavy with meaning. It’s about family, he says, and the immigrant experience and the difficulties of being distant from the people and places you love.
“One word. Six letters,” Armony says. “You are saying a lot about what matters to you.”
Everyone Has a Story
Many people at Babson know about Armony’s tattoo. That’s because, not long after he started at the College, he attended a community event for new employees and was asked to share a fact about himself.
Armony debated what to reveal, and in the end, he talked of his tattoo. He realizes that many people, especially those with high-profile positions, may not share something so personal about themselves. Armony, though, believes in openness. He seeks conversations that are rich and honest in which people ask questions of each other and truly listen to the answers.
“I love to learn, and you learn by meeting people, going to different places, experiencing different things, and always getting out of your comfort zone. That is important in learning.”
Ariel Armony, Babson provost and executive vice president
“It is about making an effort to understand where the person is coming from,” he says. “It’s important for me to understand how your history really informs who you are, to learn about people’s families, their lives, where they come from, what shaped them.”
Many new leaders in an organization go on listening tours. That’s too limiting for him. “There is no such thing as a listening tour,” Armony says. “You listen forever.” To know someone is to listen to their story, and he believes that everyone, no matter their position in life, has a tale to tell and wisdom to share. “It is not about hierarchies. It is not about formal level of education,” he says. “It is about humanity. It is about experiences. Everyone has phenomenal stories to tell.”
When Armony goes to an event, he often forgets to eat because he’s too busy listening and talking with others. Watch him at Trim Dining Hall, where he regularly eats lunch, and one can see why. Faculty, staff, and students are always approaching him to chat. “I enjoy coming here because you get to talk to so many people,” he says. After the revelation about his tattoo, a dining employee at Trim introduced herself and told him of her own tattoos, of how they reflected good times and hardships in her life. “We started a conversation so deep,” he says.
Going forward, Armony hopes to have a standing table at Trim, where he can eat and talk with faculty and staff. He’s also looking forward to meeting more students and diving further into his work as provost, strengthening Babson’s global connections, supporting faculty in their research and teaching, helping the College evolve with the high pace of technological change, and working to educate entrepreneurial leaders in all stages of their careers.
He also plans, as always, to keep listening and learning, walking and exploring, writing and traveling. Time is short, and there is much to do. Installed on Armony’s phone is an app called WeCroak, which five times a day sends messages reminding him that he will die one day. That may seem morbid, but the app is inspired by Bhutanese culture, which believes a frequent contemplation of death is crucial to happiness.
Life, in all its opportunity, awaits. “There is no immortality,” Armony says.
Posted in Community, Entrepreneurial Leadership
