April 5th for the first candidate interview

That is cutting it pretty close if Dr. Thames plans to go back to Polymers on May 20th.

I thought the original plans were to have a new president named by the first or middle of April.

Southern Belle wrote:

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April 5th for the first candidate interview

That is cutting it pretty close if Dr. Thames plans to go back to Polymers on May 20th.

I thought the original plans were to have a new president named by the first or middle of April.

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Could this mean that some minds are made up. Someone near and dear will be selected?
Someone who can come in with little or no transition time?

The Board has been excellent about posting its benchmarks for the search, including modifications as the search proceeds.

There is no secret here. Meredith has indicated (several times) he would like to announce a new President in the first week of April. The plans for bringing in the "preferred" candidate have not been secret either -- in fact they were much discussed at several levels of contact between Meredith and USM groups. Although there are unfortunate aspects to this way of doing things, Meredith has never indicated he would entertain any other method but bringing in a preferred candidate. If we don't like the preferred candidate, then we move on to #2 and so on. 

Having explained his bottom line, the Commissioner and the Board have been quite flexible in other stages of the process. The input of the university community and of faculty in particular has been far more significant in this process (at least if you look at raw percentages of constituencies and the size of the final group of representatives from the Campus Advisory Group). The collaborative effort of faculty Senate and the Deans produced a search advisory committee with eleven faculty members representing all colleges and the library. Although no one on the committee that I know has said anything specific, my sense, reading between the lines, is that they are confident of the process and satisfied with the pool of candidates.

I think we have good reason to be hopeful. Based on everything that I know (admittedly not everything possible TO know) I feel reasonably confident that Dr. Meredith is holding to his promise to run a fair search and to set the search up to obtain the best possible candidate.
Not to say things can't still go wrong, but as the process moves forward the evidence that I see is more supportive of a positive outcome than a negative one.

Doubt and skepticism are OK -- we have been badly burned in the past and we deserve to be cautious. But I think that every day we have evidence mounting that the Board is trying hard to put at least some of its old habits behind it.

We will probably never -- and probably should not -- come to the point where we accept that the Board always operates from the best interests of the whole university system all of the time. It is a human organization and clearly struggles, as all groups of people do, with the individual ambitions, agendas, strengths and frailties of its members. Clearly politics has and will continue to play a role in higher education in this state. However, I believe that the faculty at USM has managed to open up new paths of conversation with the Board and with Dr. Meredith that were not available before. I can't think of a time since I have been here when a Commissioner has met with so many faculty members as individuals or in constituent groups.
In addtion, he has signalled quite clearly his support for the AAUP as an organization that is central to, rather than marginalized by, the academic community.

I would like to believe -- but can only hope -- that the way in which faculty has conducted itself in its contacts with the Board have engendered new possibilities for mutal respect and (this would be the big hope) more direct contact between faculty and the members of the Board in ways that could be formally adopted institutionally. It appears to me that the final stages of the search process is one of those places where the Board and faculty (and university community) actually are embarked in a joint project. The degree to which they actually work successfully together in such instances may be the best forum to show the Board that faculty members, by and large, are important assets, of much greater value when they are engaged in goverance processes than when they are shut out. It is even possible that we may learn that the members of the Board are both more complex than we imagine them to be, and more capable of transcending their own sectionalism than they might appear from our perspective. 


It is easy to demonize people you don't know, and I think that has certainly happened from both sides. More contact, if it happens, might yield a more productive atmosphere.

 

Thanks LVN - I only hope I don't have to eat them fine words . . . .