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University Board of Governors holds special meeting about presidential search

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Board members phoned in Friday night to a special Board of Governors meeting regarding the University presidential search.

University Secretary Leslie Fehrenbach, Associate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel John Wolfe, and BOG Student Representative Kristen Clarke were present at the table.

BOG chair Ralph Izzo and William Funk of R. William Funk & Associates, the firm responsible for conducting the search, were among the parties on the phone line.

The open session started at 6:30 p.m. at Winants Hall on the Old Queens campus and was scheduled to close to the public at 6:35 p.m., but instead closed at 6:42 p.m. after a dialogue between Clarke, Izzo, and Funk.

“I’m … assuming that you will be getting a list of the final candidates and making your decision shortly,” said Clarke, a School of Arts and Sciences senior. “Even if that’s not the case right now, it will be soon.”

Clarke stressed the need for transparency in making the final decision and offered suggestions for creating a more open forum between the University search committee, students and faculty before a final decision is made.

“The 24-member community isn’t exactly representative of the entire University community,” she said. “There’s a lack of transparency and a lack of dialogue regarding the issue.”

Many University student leaders were under the impression that the top candidates would be brought forward to answer questions from the public, so they may be evaluated based on how they interact with the community, Clarke said.

But that is not the case, she said. The top candidates will be presented to the board and voted on by the board.

“There are so many ways to involve students and the overall Rutgers community, and the fact none of this has been done is disheartening,” Clarke said. “To ignore their voices is to ignore the 60,000 students, 10,000 staff, and hundreds of thousands of alumni and community members that are … involved,” Clarke said.

Izzo disagreed with Clarke’s statements on the search committee and BOG’s process.

“I really don’t agree [that] we didn’t reach out and try to include the voices of as many people possible,” Izzo said.

He urged that open meetings on different campuses and the official presidential search website allowed the community to understand the search procedure.

“We really tried,” Izzo said. “We gave it the old college try.”

Funk said that the search committee is the largest presidential search committee his firm has worked with in the past two decades.

“It’s what the candidates, more or less, dictate to us,” Funk said. “We have found [that] attracting the very best candidates is increasingly difficult to do unless you can ensure them that the process is confidential until the very end.”

The procedure of naming only one finalist follows that of other institutions in the Association of American Universities, of which the University is a part of, Funk said.

Smaller schools are capable of bringing in three finalists, as is the traditional method, he said.

But Funk said major research universities, like the University of Virginia, University of Minnesota and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, find that they must conduct this type of search to find the best nominees.

Izzo said that he would get back to Clarke on the possibility of facilitating interaction between potential candidates and the University community.

He indicated that part of the closed agenda was a discussion of the rest of the presidential search process and how to move forward from its current stage.

Five students, including Rutgers University Student Assembly President Matt Cordeiro and RUSA Vice President John Connelly, were also present for the open portion of the meeting.

Greg Brown, the CEO for Motorola and a University alumnus heading the search committee, said Thursday a list of finalists would not be presented to the board at the special meeting, according to nj.com.



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