[T]he University of Vermont plans to expedite the search process for a new president.
The presidential search committee met for the first time on Tuesday and made a commitment to naming the next UVM leader by February. The panel stressed the need to attract diverse candidates.
The 24-person search committee, which consists of a mix of trustees, faculty, staff and students, is mandated to provide an unranked recommendation for suitable candidates to the board of trustees by February. The finalists will be publicly announced in December.
UVM President Tom Sullivan announced in August that he would be stepping aside as president and joining the faculty in summer 2019. During Sullivan’s tenure, the university saw a record number of student applications, a bump in graduation rates and successfully raised $500 million for a capital campaign.
At protests last year, students called for his resignation, following the posting of racist signs on campus.
NoNames for Justice, the student group leading the effort, asked the administration to hire more faculty of color and LGBTQA faculty, increase the diversity of the student body, rename some campus buildings and offer university-wide diversity and inclusion training.
Search committee members discussed what can be done to ensure the university attracts diverse candidates.
Members of the committee will undergo implicit bias training during an upcoming meeting, and search committee co-chair and board vice chair Ron Lumbra said Witt/Kieffer, the executive search company the university retained for the search, has identified diverse candidates for other institutions.
“Diversity matters, it matters on this committee, it matters in how we make our outreach, it matters in how we want to conduct this search to attract the very best talent, the very widest talent,” Lumbra said.
Committee co-chair and board chairman David Daigle said he wouldn’t connect the committee’s discussion of diversity to last year’s protests.
“I think we’re in an environment where the diversity of candidates that would look at the University of Vermont position is far greater than what we would have seen 20 years ago or 30 years ago,” he said. “I think it’s incumbent upon us, all of us in this process, to create a diverse pool so that we can choose the best possible person.”
The trustees hope to make a final decision in February.
Semi-finalist interviews are scheduled for December, which will be followed by the public announcement of finalists and visits to campus. In recent years, debates over whether to make visits from finalists public have become more common.
Opponents argue that public searches can limit the potential pool of candidates, while proponents say private searches limit the community’s voice in the selection process.
Dennis Barden, a senior partner at Witt/Kieffer working on the UVM search, said the search format will balance the needs of both the candidates and the university community.
“The candidates would prefer confidentiality, and the university community would prefer openness,” he said. “This process, which is confidential through the semi-finalist interviews and then becomes open for the finalists, is, frankly, a fairly well-embraced optimal of those two priorities.”
The search will follow the same process as the last presidential search, and Lumbra said an open search lines up with the culture at UVM.
“Making sure we have a process that allows various parts of the community access to finalists was really important for us to make sure we built an inclusive process that included the community,” he said.
The search is already attracting well-qualified candidates, Barden said, and will likely be competing with searches at the University of Southern California, Michigan State University, Texas Tech University and the University of Texas El-Paso.
But UVM is in a strong position to attract a top candidate, Barden said. The aggressive time schedule will put the university ahead of other institutions whose presidents decide this fall to leave their positions.
He said UVM’s status as a mid-sized public university should attract candidates from both large public institutions and smaller private institutions. UVM also has a high percentage of out-of-state students who bring in more revenue to the university than in-state students.
UVM’s status as the only research university in the state and its medical center also set the institution apart, he said.
“All of these are things are really going to be selling on, that we’re going to be highlighting to candidates for the position,” Barden said. “We have every reason to believe that that’s going to make you attractive to a wide swath of leadership.”
