Hunt for next UW chancellor begins

by Carolyn Potts

Monday, January 28, 2008 01:13

The search for the next University of Wisconsin chancellor kicked off Friday afternoon with the first official meeting of the Search-and-Screen Committee.

Most members of the Search-and-Screen Committee and members of the special five-member Board of Regents committee discussed how the process of finding the new chancellor would work and what their task will be over the next few months.

“I think it is important that anyone you present as a finalist, you feel confident can do the job,” UW System President Kevin Reilly said. “You want somebody that is a student-centered chancellor. With 40,000 students on this campus, we want somebody who thinks that is a really important part of the job.”

Reilly asked the committee to submit around 20 candidates for review, and the Search-and-Screen Committee will also receive the assistance of a search firm to be chosen by chair Marsha Mailick-Seltzer.

“The search firm is here to help us,” Mailick-Seltzer said. “They know people at other universities that are interested in becoming chancellors and … if we ask them to enlarge the pool, they will go out and encourage them to apply.”

Mailick-Seltzer added the search firm would be helpful in organizing the meeting schedule when semi-final candidates would be interviewed.

Reilly urged the committee members to take their jobs very seriously and expressed how important confidentiality is to this search.

“We will lose good people unless we can keep their names confidential up to the point where they have to be made public,” Reilly said. “If names are made public before then … Madison and the System will develop a reputation as a place that does that to candidates, and it will make subsequent searches harder down the road.”

Reilly and Mailick-Seltzer also stressed the importance of staying on a strict time schedule. They would like to have a new chancellor in place by September, and they would like to have time for the finalists to come and speak before this semester’s exam period starts, Reilly said.

“We certainly need to move in a deliberate fashion and not rush anything, but where we can move things along, cumulatively that will make a difference in our ability to meet the deadlines,” Mailick-Seltzer added.

Mailick-Seltzer said the committee members will be working very closely with one another and all decisions will be made together. The committee will be voting formally throughout their decision-making process rather than just having group consensus.

“This is a very compressed process and we will be spending a lot of time together. Part of what happens is that we get to know each other and build consensus on a pretty intense basis,” Mailick-Seltzer said. “As a result of that, we will not be working in subcommittees.”

Nominations for the chancellor position are already filtering in and the committee will begin submitting nominations themselves shortly.