residential colleges of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Provost of Eton is the chair of the governors of Eton College. Many universities also use provost as the title for the chief executive officers of their international branch campuses. Some of these universities also use provost (often in combination as "provost and deputy vice-chancellor" or similar) for their chief academic officer. Glasgow Caledonian New York College shows a mixture of this with the US system: the president of the college is the Glasgow-based Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, leaving the New York-based Vice President and Provost as the senior official at the campus. History The title "provost" (Latin: praepositus) has been used in England from medieval times for the head of colleges such as Oriel College, Oxford and Eton College. More recent colleges have adopted the same usage, e.g. the principal of University College London was retitled as provost in 1906, and Durham University adopted the title for University College Stockton in 1999 (until it was split into two new colleges in 2001). Following its usage for the heads of colleges, some multi-campus state university systems in the United States have used provost as the title of the head of a branch campus. For example, the chancellors of the Newark and Camden campuses of Rutgers University in New Jersey were formerly known as provosts. A similar practice arose in Britain in the early 21st century with the establishment of international branch campuses, many of which were headed by provosts. The establishment of provosts as the chief academic officers of universities in the US began in the first half of the 20th century. The first use of the title in American higher education was in 1754 at the University (then the College) of Pennsylvania. The post was created under Benjamin Franklin as president of the board of trustees, and while Franklin was in this position he remained heavily involved in the college. However, on Franklin's retirement in 1755 the provost took up the more usual (at the time) role of head of the college, which it retained until the re-establishment of the presidency of the university in 1930. At Columbia University, the board of trustees established the office of provost in 1811 as a political compromise; it was abolished five years later when the holder departed. The Trustees and the president of the university re-established the office of