Members of the UW community hope this presidential search is more open than the last search two years ago, which resulted in the short-lived presidency of Robert Sternberg.
The board of trustees revealed a rough timeline for the search last month that emphasized transparency and faculty, staff and student input. Faculty and staff said they hope this will mean a more inclusive search process.
“If they don’t have input from the community and from the poor slobs who work here and from the students, they’re likely to make a mistake on the scale of Sternberg,” Donal O’Toole, professor of veterinary sciences, said. “When Sternberg stepped down, it put the trustees in a tremendous bind because they had insisted on secrecy.”
O’Toole has been at UW since 1990 and paid close attention to the last three presidential searches. All of them, he said, suffered from a lack of transparency—a problem the new search hopefully will not have.
“What we’re not looking for is Sternberg,” O’Toole said. “The process is better this year than it’s been in the past three searches.”
Rachel Stevens, staff senate chair, said the staff was pleased so far with the way the search is set up and focuses on openness.
“I think they’re taking a really good approach,” she said. “Taking our suggestions gives the search a much better chance of succeeding.”
The board’s timeline contains provisions for two committees, one to find 10 to 15 presidential candidates and another to narrow that pool down to five or fewer candidates. Each committee will be made up of five trustees, two faculty members, two staff members, two students, a Foundation board member and two external members.
Faculty senate, staff senate and ASUW have put together lists of potential names for their constituencies’ respective seats. The board will review the lists before choosing representatives from each group.
“We hope that President Palmerlee will take those lists and consider those names and hopefully place those people, but there’s nothing within the document that we all received that suggested that had to be the case,” Faculty Senate Chair Tucker Readdy said. “So this is an opportunity for us to offer some input, but there’s no guarantee that the names that we put forward are going to be the names they announce at their retreat in July.”
Readdy said he was submitting a list he’s confident about.
“I think it’s important that we represent the faculty who are still primarily in research and teaching roles, but we also need to represent faculty who are in administrative roles like department roles,” he said. “At the end of the day, when we put the names forward and the names are selected, I want people to say ‘that person should do a good job.’”
