Small, constituency-based groups may have the opportunity to meet confidentially with presidential finalists before the board of trustees selects someone for the position next month, Presidential Search Committee Chairman Gary Abramson said Thursday at a town hall meeting.
Abramson said the committee had not worked out the details of the meetings and did not know whether the final candidates would agree to meet with groups.
"If they're amenable to it, we would plan to set up separate meetings with each of the groups - deans, faculty, students and some of the vice presidents as well," he said.
The committee set up its search timeline to have the board select the new president in May, and Abramson said he believed the committee will have selected its finalists for the position in time to present them for review by the board at its May 17-18 meeting.
"Our goal would be to bring someone on this summer - June, July - and have him or her ready to go in the fall," he said.
The board's expected selection of a new president would come more than two years after the board's Executive Committee first received an anonymous letter detailing former President Ben Ladner's alleged misuse of university funds. The board suspended Ladner with pay in August 2005 and he resigned later that year after the board decided to fire him and offered him a $3.75 million severance package.
Interim President Neil Kerwin became acting president when the board suspended Ladner and became interim president after the board forced Ladner to resign, The Eagle previously reported.
Robin Brood, a professor in the School of International Service who attended the meeting, told the board that while she was glad the search was continuing to progress, she remained concerned about the level of confidentiality with which the committee has operated since beginning the search last September.
"Will you do anything to relay to the candidates that there is concern in different parts of this campus with having a process of picking a new president that's not transparent to the broader community given the problems we've had in the recent past with transparency and responsibility?" she said.
Matthew Pittinsky, a trustee who serves on the Presidential Search Committee and also served as a student member of the committee that chose Ladner in 1994, said the committee has discussed the AU community's concerns about openness and transparency with the candidates but added that he understood why some candidates wanted to remain confidential.
"Thinking of myself as a candidate, which I'm not, I can understand why somebody sitting as a current dean, provost, president ... would feel so sensitive about having their candidacy made public at a premature point in the process," he said. "If they're not the one ultimately selected, they'll have to go back to wherever they came from"
