MSU Denver ‘sage’ carried the Constitution in his pocket and jazz in his soul

Former professor and Political Science Department chair Norman W. Provizer, Ph.D., whose broad interests and unwavering desire to educate students and engage the public invigorated Metropolitan State University of Denver for decades, has died at the age of 80.

He was perhaps as well-known beyond campus as he was within it. A tireless voice representing the University in the public arena, he also found time to share his seemingly limitless knowledge of and love for jazz with readers of the Rocky Mountain News and DownBeat. He also hosted “Jazz Notes” on Denver’s KUVO-FM.

“He was truly unbelievable,” said Robert Hazan, Ph.D., professor emeritus and former chair of the Political Science Department, who acknowledged that it is highly likely that Provizer never slept.

Those who knew him recalled Provizer as a man who carried a pocket version of the U.S. Constitution with him but was as deeply curious about the rest of the world — at the University of Pennsylvania, his doctoral dissertation was on political development in Uganda — as he was the workings of this country and its government.

When Provizer arrived at Metro State, as the University was known then, in 1989, the Political Science Department was barely more than a three-person operation. “Then, he came in and it boomed,” Hazan said. “It grew exponentially.”

Provizer’s widely recognized expertise in politics and international affairs no doubt helped propel that growth. He wrote numerous research papers and authored or co-authored chapters in several books, including 2015 and 2018 volumes on presidential swing states and a chapter on Women as Global Leaders in a book about former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Never one to be constrained to a narrow range of topics, he also co-wrote a journal article with his daughter Jennifer Provizer on Russian author Leo Tolstoy and literary imagination.

Hazan said Provizer forged partnerships with other departments, helped create minor curricula within the department and, as chair, often functioned as the voice of reason when internecine squabbles erupted. “He was an incredibly reasonable man,” Hazan said. “We called him ‘The Sage.’”

It was Provizer who created the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership inside the little brick bungalow on the Auraria Campus where the future prime minister of Israel once lived. A year before he arrived at MSU Denver, community leaders had rescued the dilapidated duplex from demolition and moved it to campus. Provizer saw boundless opportunity in the crumbling brick, which he explained to MSU Denver President Janine Davidson, Ph.D., in a 2019 video about the center.

“It seemed to me that what would be truly appropriate would be not just to have the house but to have an academically oriented program doing things to make it alive,” he told MSU Denver’s alumni magazine in 2000.

Through connections in the community, and just never being afraid to ask, Provizer hosted a pantheon of luminaries there, from the arts as well as politics and international affairs. Those guests included then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and jazz great Wynton Marsalis, two people who personify Provizer’s great passions: political science and jazz.

In 1998, the Meir Center created a leadership award in honor of Meir’s 100th birthday and presented it to recipients including film director Steven Spielberg, vocalist Diane Reeves, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

If Provizer wasn’t cowed by those who enjoyed stratospheric fame, neither was he afraid to labor in the trenches, ensuring that details were taken care of. In “Historical Studies Journal, published in 2008, his daughter, Jennifer Provizer, MSU Denver’s study-abroad advisor, recalls as a child walking into the Meir House before an event, “carrying hand soap, toilet paper and towels, and my mother would be schlepping bagels, spread, serving platters and plastic utensils.”

Having created the Meir Center and expanded the Political Science Department, Provizer turned his attention to jazz on campus, helping infuse jazz curricula into the University’s Department of Music.

Politics and jazz might seem strange bedfellows, but Provizer explained the unlikely connection to Metropolitan Denver Magazine in 2013: “Both politics and jazz are about the art of improvisation.”

Though he didn’t play an instrument himself, his devotion to jazz won him a 2020 Jazz Hero designation, courtesy of the Jazz Journalists Association, and the right to be a Grammy voter.

At hours when most colleagues were crawling into warm beds, Provizer headed to storied Denver clubs like Dazzle and El Chapultepec, often taking students with him. He viewed those late-night outings as teaching opportunities, Hazan said.

Those trips were interrupted once a year, when Provizer took groups of students to view the beating heart of American politics in Washington, D.C., said Robert Preuhs, Ph.D., professor and current chair of the Department of Political Science.

The trips typically included visits to Colorado’s congressional delegation. Beyond that, though, “He never knew exactly what he was going to do there,” Preuhs said. “He used to say they would just ‘show up and see what’s happening.’”

Provizer was, Preuhs wrote in an email to colleagues announcing his death, “a giant in the Department, across the University and Denver in so many ways.”

Hazan shared that sentiment. “We loved him. We respected him.”

Provizer is survived by his wife, Roz, and daughter Jennifer Provizer.

Memorial contributions may be made in his honor to the American Civil Liberties Union or National Kidney Foundation.