After assuming office during a period of severe budget reductions and leading the university through it, UW President Laurie Nichols will be undergoing an 18-month performance evaluation as part of her three-year contract.
“The trustees are tasked with the responsibility of conducting an extensive evaluation during the first 18 months of her tenure,” UW Board of Trustees Vice President Dave True said. “It has been a long-standing procedure.”
Rather than an internal evaluation, the trustees will be relying on outside evaluator Dr. Stephen Portch, former chancellor of the University System of Georgia, as an impartial arbiter with extensive experience in the higher education domain but without preconceived notions.
“We thought that Dr. Portch, having done similar evaluations in his career and after serving as chancellor of a university system himself, would be a really good resource to assist the trustees in this process of gathering input,” True said. “Based on what I have understood, a facilitator such as Dr. Portch, who has a great deal more experience with this type of information-gathering than do the trustees, I think is a prudent approach.”
Portch will be on the UW campus Wednesday, Feb. 14, for closed meetings to gather feedback and hear different perspectives from prominent members of the UW community, such as senate leaders, administrators and stakeholders. Students and the general public will also have a chance to speak at an open meeting the same day, which will be broadcast and recorded on WyoCast.
For conducting the evaluation process, Portch will be paid $16,000 — plus reasonable travel expenses.
“The board of trustees has decided that’s a good value,” Faculty Senate Chair Michael Barker said. “It could be compared to the amount of expense it would take internally to do that comprehensive review, in terms of administrative time, in terms of faculty time, in terms of the committee they would have to charge with that evaluation, in terms of the board of trustees’ time.”
Portch’s visit comes during a time of recovery and change at the university. After UW experienced two short-lived presidencies and a budget crisis, Nichols hit the ground running with a new five-year strategic plan, “Breaking Through,” as a comprehensive initiative to guide UW forward. Currently, a process for revising outdated regulations and introducing new ones is underway, which has given many faculty members cause for concern that the board of trustees is attempting to expand their authority too broadly, especially into areas of the president’s responsibility.
“The trustees are overreaching,” Faculty Senate Chair-Elect Dr. Donal O’Toole said. “They’re micro-managing the university and they’re undercutting her authority and my concern is they’re pretty used to that. They need to trust Laurie to succeed or fail.”
At a meeting of the Faculty Senate in November, at which the first of many regulation revisions was discussed, Nichols expressed her understanding that the trustees may have needed to take a more hands-on approach during the dark times of former President Robert Sternberg, as well as her hope that the university would soon stabilize and return to business as usual.
Barker has also expressed confidence in the leadership of Nichols, as opposed to her predecessors, as he discussed the process of drafting new regulations that would hold strong in the future.
“I spent hours on these and what I pretended was that Sternberg was still president and it concerned me greatly,” Barker said. “But we don’t have Sternberg — we have Nichols.”
