[J]ust weeks after Norwich University graduated its bicentennial class, University President Richard Schneider announced that he will be stepping down in June 2020 — opening the way for the first presidential search in almost three decades.
Schneider, 73, the longest serving president in the university’s history, has headed Norwich since 1992. To fill his shoes, an internal Presidential Search Committee will nominate three candidates to Norwich’s Board of Trustees, which will then select Schneider’s replacement in January. The committee is made up of 21 people: ten from the Board of Trustees and 11 representatives from various sectors of the university.
“It’s the trustees that make the final decisions,” committee chair Phil Soucy said. “The committee’s job is to tee up three highly qualified candidates, and my goal is to come up with three that, hopefully, make it very hard for us to decide.”
To help facilitate the hiring process, the committee is partnering with a search firm called Academic Search, Inc. — the same organization that recruited Schneider almost 30 years ago.
“I don’t think they believed it would be 28 years before we hired them again,” said David Whaley, the school’s liaison between the Committee and Academic Search. “But they did such a good job, that’s what happened.”
The parameters for the committee’s search are intentionally broad. Both Soucy and Whaley noted that they did not want to keep candidates from applying, regardless of specific experience: Although the president of Norwich automatically becomes a Major General in the Vermont State Militia, the recruitment requirements do not require that candidates have a military background. The committee has agreed to prioritize leadership and shared values over military experience.
“It really does come down to finding someone with leadership experience and the ability to lead a complex organization,” Soucy said.
Whoever the next president of Norwich will be, they will inherit a university with a strong history of educational growth. During his tenure, Schneider quintupled the school’s endowment, grew enrollment over 70 percent, and established an innovative online college. By the end of 2019, over 96 percent of the school’s academic spaces will be renovated or new.
“I think when I look back, the thing that I am most proud about is staying true to the vision of the founder,” Schneider said. “We’re citizen soldiers here — citizens first, and then soldiers if we have to be to defend our republic and our freedom.”
Schneider is a Coast Guard Academy graduate who served eight years of active duty, including a tour in Vietnam. Before coming to Norwich, he also held several administrative positions at Drexel University.
“He has built this school,” Whaley said of Schneider. “He took a school that was in pretty good shape and has made it great — and has positioned it to become even greater going forward under the new person.”
And as for Schneider’s personal plans? He will retire to a camp on Lake Dunmore, where he has promised his wife that he won’t do any work for the first summer. But until then, Schneider still has one more year as the president of Norwich — a year that he said he plans to take full advantage of.
“We’re in economic warfare, we’re in culture warfare, and we’re in real warfare, and that means everybody’s got to be as smart and as ready as they can be,” Schneider said. “And that’s my job: to get this little place ready to be as relevant as it can be for the service of this republic.”
