Chair Talk 3.18

Presidential Search Progress 

An update on the status of the search for our next President: meetings were held Feb 17-18 with a number of potential prospects.  The search committee had the opportunity to gauge the suitability of these prospects to be serious candidates for the position. 

I participated fully in the interviews via phone from Australia – from roughly 3am to 11am each day, my time, managing to stay awake throughout.  Based on input from faculty in response to my previous Chair Talk, I asked every one of the prospects the same multi-part question – to discuss the importance of tenure and what they would do to defend it, how they see its role in buttressing academic freedom, and what they think is a proper balance between tenure-track and career-track faculty (my current preferred label for faculty who are not on the tenure-track).  I’m pleased to report that every one of the prospects strongly defended tenure and its importance.  They also all understood the important role now played by career-track faculty and the ways in which universities must provide security and inclusion in shared governance for all faculty, both tenure track and career track.  Other members of the search committee asked about many of the other issues that were on the minds of those faculty who responded to my last message.  

The search committee has largely done its job – a short list of prospects was identified and communicated to the Regents, who will now take the further steps needed to identify the next President of the UA.  Exactly how the process will play out at this point is not entirely clear, as there are variables outside of our control.  As you know, confidentiality has been, and remains, a very important part of the process – many excellent prospects cannot afford to have their interest known publicly – such exposure could have serious consequences for their current positions.  The Regents, in taking the next steps, will have to deal with these complexities.  They understand that there are virtues of a more open process, but until a certain point, those virtues are outweighed by the negatives.  It remains my hope that this balance will shift while there are still multiple prospects willing to be publicly identified as real candidates, but this might not turn out to be the case.  In any event, the prospects we interviewed last week were all outstanding – and I am confident that whoever is chosen to be our next President will be someone we can be proud of, and expect great things from.

Lynn Nadel
Chair of the Faculty