A committee has been formed, a search firm chosen, and community forums planned. Next on the agenda for UK’s presidential search: finding the best person for the job.
Advertisements have been circulating the academic world for about a month, Board of Trustees Chair Britt Brockman said, in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education. Brockman said from the advertisements, the search committee — along with Greenwood/Asher & Associates, the executive search firm hired to find UK’s 12th president — will be soliciting nominees and contacting people that may qualify for the job.
The position announcement was finalized in November, expressing specific qualities that UK’s new leader would ideally possess, such as leadership and management skills, a history of scholarly achievement, and effective communication abilities.
The announcement also mentions UK’s goal to become a Top 20 public research institution by 2020.
“I think the committee needs to focus on an individual who has clearly demonstrated that they understand the complexities of a large organization with multiple missions … and has demonstrated an expertise in balancing the many components within the organization, such as academics, athletics and health care,” University Senate Council Chair Hollie Swanson, one of the three faculty members on the search committee, said in an e-mail to the Kernel.
“Given the challenges currently facing higher education, it is also critical that the individual has integrity, a commitment to the ideals of higher education and a vision for a brighter future,” Swanson said. She also stressed the importance of experience with shared governance in a new leader.
“The search committee to this point has not had a lot to do,” Brockman said. Most of the work so far has been in the hands of the Greenwood/Asher.
However, when the committee meets after holding its Jan. 28 community forums, there will be much more to talk about.
“I believe Jan. 28 will be really when the meat and potatoes begins — when the hard work begins — for the search committee,” Brockman said.
He hopes the forums will provide the committee with certain characteristics to look for in the candidates and help narrow down the list of potentials from hundreds of names to just a few.
Brockman expects search committee meetings to be frequent after Friday, since the tentative deadline for a final decision is set for May 1. He called the deadline “very ambitious.”
An increasingly talked-about issue regarding the search is the matter of confidentiality for any potential candidates.
Some of the best candidates currently have secure jobs, and revealing that they are interested in a new position could threaten those jobs.
“Many candidates will simply not become candidates if this is not held in strict confidence,” Brockman said.
He acknowledged the difficulty in honoring openness and transparency if the UK community can know only the finalist chosen to be the next president, but he knows that many candidates may refuse to advance in the search process if they must reveal themselves publicly.
Brockman hopes that the search committee will discuss confidentiality at its Jan. 28 meeting and give a recommendation to the board of trustees, whose next meeting is on Feb 22. It is ultimately up to the board to decide whether or not candidates’ identities will be kept confidential or not.
“An ideal process is one that would embrace as much transparency as possible such that the faculty, staff and students can be ensured that the best possible candidate has been chosen as the next University of Kentucky president,” Swanson said.
Brockman has challenged the search committee to give the board of trustees an unordered list of three to five candidates by mid-April.
The cost of hiring the search firm is approximately $100,000, Brockman said, not including travel, legal and other expenses. As of now, he estimates the total cost of the presidential search to be between $150,000 and $200,000.
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