The Faculty
Senate voted Monday to open the closed doors of the Chancellor
Search Committee, calling for forums and interviews with
each candidate considered for the position.
The Senate unanimously approved the resolution,
which calls for meetings between the candidates and the constituent
groups represented on the committee, such as Faculty Senate,
Staff Council and the Student Government Association.
The resolution states: “It is crucial that the incoming
chancellor have the legitimacy and trust that can be generated
only through a process in which the faculty are involved.”
“When the applicant pool gets down to the point of
five to eight semi-finalists, we want those people to meet
with various campus groups,” Faculty Senate chair Paul
H. Gates said.
“This very much asks for the same type of process we
used in the provost search last year,” he said. “The
four people we did bring in met with everyone.”
Gates said that the interviews between the provost groups
and the candidates were taken into consideration for the
final decision.
The resolution also calls for a forum featuring all candidates
applying for chancellor. The Search Committee had previously
announced that no more open forums are currently planned.
The last chancellor forum, held in September, gathered input
for what the committee should be looking for in the applicants.
The new forum would give students, faculty and staff a chance
to meet the candidates.
“I think it should be open,” Erin E. Conn, a
senior computer science major from Lenoir, said. “Students
should be informed of who is going to be running [their school].”
“The chancellor is the campus leader of everybody,
not just students, or faculty or staff, but all of us,”
Gates said.
If approved, the forum would be much better advertised than
the informational meeting in September, which saw a low turnout
among students, he said.
The reason behind the closed nature of the search is to protect
the current jobs of the candidates, SGA president Rachel
A. Johnson said in an address to the SGA Senate.
As to whether a public forum providing the candidates’
names would be a good idea, Johnson had no comment.
If a candidate’s job was threatened, that person would
probably not be the best candidate for chancellor, Gates
said. He added that probably would not be true of all applicants.
“A chancellor or any administrator who was jeopardized
for being on the market was probably on thin ice at home,”
Gates said.
Staff Council president Terri L. Miller said the Staff Council
is in agreement with making the process more open.
“I think if it is a open session at an end, it always
makes the door be open for additional input, whereas, if
it’s not an open search, where would it come from?”
she said.
Gates said he thinks the committee will take the resolution
seriously. “I think we are taken as seriously as every
other member,” he said. “If I didn’t have
the confidence that it would have an affect, I wouldn’t
have supported [the resolution].”
The Council of Chairs also passed a similar resolution earlier
this month, calling for a more open search.
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