Today: Mar 28, 2024

Dean position to be filled

College of Arts and Sciences holds open forums to introduce four new dean candidates

Abby Epstein – News Writer

Several months, one nationwide search, and one position to fill: soon one applicant will be named the new dean for the biggest department on campus, the College of Arts and Sciences.

“It is a competitive search process done at the national level, and often when we do administration, we will bring in a consultant and we have brought in an [AGB] consultant,” said Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Robert Prezant.

The first step to finding a dean is creating an advertisement about the position and the type of person the university is looking for. “

The consultant comes to campus and meets with different groups to help design what the advertisement will look like,” said Prezant. One group the consultant talks to is the College of Arts and Sciences.

“They do ask us for our input in what we are looking for in a dean when creating the advertisement,” said Associate Dean of Arts and Science Craig Hlavac.

Along with hiring a consultant, a search committee made up of 10 to 11 people who represent different parts of the campus at Southern helps with the process.

The chairperson of this search committee is Margaret Generali, who is also the chairperson of Counseling Services and the Department of Psychology at Southern.

One job of the committee is to go through all the applications they have received and narrow the pool down to eight to 10 candidates.

“A neutral site is picked for interviews. Southern uses Bradley airport,” said Hlavac.

The Airport was used as their offsite interview place early in the process because they want to keep the candidates confidential.

“We use some of their facilities to bring the candidates in and have them interviewed by the search committee and then separately by me,” said Prezant.

Once the search committee and Prezant come together, they discuss how each candidate’s interviews went and narrow down the pool to just four candidates. These four candidates then come to the Southern’s campus where they meet with faculty and students.

“They have a day and a half on campus and so they start off with a tour of campus, they meet with students, they meet with staff, the president’s leadership, the deans, the provost council which includes the deans,” said Generali.

All four candidates came to campus for the final part of the process the week of Jan. 27. The final candidates are Bruce Kalk from Southern, Andrew Barnes from Pratt Institute, Tony Lemieux from Georgia State University, and. Kathy Cooke from the University of South Alabama.

“The whole committee will meet next week and discuss all of the feedback from all of the groups that have met with all the different candidates and then choose and junction from there which is done with the provost,” said Generali.

Prezant said it is a very long process in order to find a dean.

“Probably if we added up all the time from the day, we said we were going to do the search, to the day we hire somebody, it can take half a year.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Latest from Blog

Don't Miss

Football team wins second game in a row

Ben Martin – Sports Writer The university football team is took on the

My Mind & Me Documentary starts up conversations 

Sarah Shelton – Photo Editor  One of the biggest role models in my