REPORT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARCH COMMITTEE TO THE
LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES
ROBERT C. BUCHANAN, '62, CHAIR
This report and recommendation to the board is the culmination of a search process that began one year ago this week.
At the winter meeting a year ago, the Board of Trustees adopted a charge that outlined the board's expectations for the search process and the authority granted to the Presidential Search Committee. The search committee was to develop a statement of desired presidential qualifications that would guide the search and selection process and share them with candidates and nomination sources. It was to adopt a timetable for the search that would permit the appointment of a president by March 2, 2004. It was to conduct an active national search to attract highly qualified candidates. It was to make periodic progress reports to the board of trustees and the college community. It was to observe strict confidentiality in the conduct of the search. And it was to bring the name of one or more finalist candidates to the board, which retained the right to select and appoint the president.
Today we have fulfilled that charge. Before the board acts on the search committee's recommendation, though, I want to tell you exactly how we went about our business and came to this happy moment. It has been an incredibly exciting and fascinating process for all of us on the committee.
When we started a year ago, many of us had never even met each other. Almost immediately the group clicked. Our discussions have been open and frank, but always respectful and constructive, and totally devoid of rancor. To stay on task it's often been necessary to use subgroups of the committee to sort through material or thorny questions between meetings of the full committee, and several members have gone that extra mile time and again. Meanwhile, here is what we did.
Constituting the Commitee Membership
We began by constituting the committee. At the January 2003 meeting of the board, Jeff Riester announced that he had invited me to chair the search committee, and together we determined that the committee would consist of four trustees, four faculty members, two alumni representatives, two students, one Lawrence staff member, and the chair and the secretary of the board (Jeff Riester and Margaret Carroll) serving ex officio. In addition to me, he named trustees Bill Hochkammer, Harold Jordan, and Cyndy Stiehl. (And, I should add, the committee later clarified that the ex officio members should be voting members).
To find the four faculty members, Jeff Riester and I turned to the faculty Committee on Governance, which is a committee elected by the faculty. That committee set some ground rules of its own, one being that only tenured faculty would be eligible. We agreed to that ground rule, but with the stipulation that junior faculty should be involved in other aspects of the search as it progressed. The four faculty members who were recommended and who have served on the search committee are physics professor David Cook, French professor Eilene Hoft-March, oboe professor Howard Niblock, and classics professor Daniel Taylor.
In looking for representatives of Lawrence alumni, we sought the advice of the alumni office, and asked that the nominees be people who could participate regularly in our meetings. Our alumni members are Stephanie Vrabec and Mike Cisler.
Jeff Riester turned to the Lawrence University Community Council (LUCC), the student governing body, to recommend students to serve on the search committee. In a campuswide e-mail, LUCC solicited responses from students who wished to serve and who would be on campus and available during the committee's work. From the respondents, LUCC recommended four students for the two slots, and a subset of the search committee interviewed those four and chose Sara Compas (a mathematics major) and Peter Gillette (a five-year English/Trumpet Performance double degree candidate), both juniors this year.
The staff member is Lawrence's registrar, Anne Norman. She was chosen from a list suggested by President Richard Warch, which purposely did not include anyone who reports directly to him.
I might point out that Lawrence alums are very well represented on the committee -- in addition to the two designated alumni representatives, all six trustee members are alums, as are Professor Dan Taylor and registrar Anne Norman.
Planning the Search Process
The full search committee convened for the first time on March 13, 2003. All of our meetings were held off campus, in my offices downtown, and my executive assistant, Stephanie Conway, has served brilliantly and faithfully as our secretary, coordinator, scheduler, travel agent, food purveyor, you name it -- always with a smile.
At that first meeting, we discussed and then signed a confidentiality statement, vowing to keep all deliberations of the committee confidential, in fairness to the search process and in fairness to the candidates, who would be promised confidentiality. We agreed that the only spokesperson for the committee would be me, and that I would keep the board informed in brief reports as the search continued. We also agreed that I would send periodic e-mails to the campus constituencies on the progress of the search, which I have done. And we set up a search website, with a link from the Lawrence website home page, to keep the campus constituency informed about the progress of the search and about how to submit ideas or suggestions or concerns.
We agreed on a tentative timetable for the search, to conform to the board's wish to have it concluded by March 2 of this year. We agreed it would be desirable, if possible, to recommend a candidate or candidates to the board at the winter meeting, well ahead of March 2.
Our next task was to decide whether to use a search consultant, which we quickly decided was a must, both to inform us on best practices at other colleges and to help us cast as wide a net as possible. Jeff Riester and I then narrowed the field to six potential consulting firms, and we received proposals from four of those. A subcommittee reviewed the proposals, selected three firms to be interviewed, and checked references on all three firms. Following the interviews, the subcommittee recommended, and the search committee approved, Academic Search, represented by Barbara Taylor, who was a godsend. You'll remember that Barbara was here at our meetings a year ago to facilitate the board's discussion of what we were hoping the search would produce, which became four broad questions that guided much of the subsequent discussion. Those four questions were:
Academic Search began its involvement in earnest in late April, with visits to the campus by both Barbara Taylor and Bruce Alton, the son of our former colleague on this board, Bishop Ralph Alton. In order to broaden the direct participation of various constituencies in the search process, and to engage the entire community in considering the board's four questions, search committee members helped to assemble separate open meetings of students, senior faculty, junior faculty, staff, and alumni. At each of these meetings, the consultant asked the views of the participants on what Lawrence offered and what we were looking for in a president.
Based on these listening sessions, the consultant drafted a prospectus, a list of criteria, and a job description to be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education to encourage nominations and applications. You all received copies of the prospectus and criteria at that point and also this week in the packets you got when you arrived. The consultant advised us that the purpose of the prospectus was to introduce the college, not to answer every question a candidate might have, and that promising candidates would receive a packet of more detailed information after they expressed interest. The search committee debated and worked over the draft collectively in a meeting and also sent suggestions individually. In late May, we published the prospectus and ran the ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Soliciting and Screening Candidates for the Position
In June, the search began in earnest. Supplementing the ad, we and the consultant reached out to possible sources of nominations, including academic deans at schools like Lawrence and outside the nine dots. The consultant scoured her rolodex and her many contacts for potential candidates.
By our stated deadline, we had received 119 letters of nomination, and 22 of those were followed by applications from the people nominated. We had 40 candidates who were self-nominated. Our consultant nominated 21 candidates -- including, I should point out, the one we are bringing to you today.
We met in early August to discuss and agree on a process for screening applicants' credentials. In early October, a subcommittee reviewed all of the applications then on hand and recommended 25 for further consideration by the full committee. On October 15, the committee narrowed that pool to 16, and with the consultant's help we reviewed reference checking procedures. We agreed to ask these top candidates for permission to check references.
For that purpose, the search committee was divided into teams of two, and each team called at least four (and usually several more) references on the candidates it had been assigned. We all had a list of questions to follow, so that every candidate would have roughly the same reference database when we were through.
We met again on November 5. Each team gave detailed reports on the reference checks, and the full committee discussed each of the candidates on the basis of these checks. Two of the 16 under consideration were dropped at the start, and by the end of the meeting we had narrowed the list to eight candidates who would be invited to off-campus interviews.
Interviewing the Candidates
The weekend of December 5 and 6, the whole search committee traveled to the O'Hare Hilton to interview the eight candidates -- four one day, four the next. These interviews were scripted, and the questions were assigned to specific committee members, again so that the candidates would be treated as equitably as possible and so that we could evaluate them evenly. Each interview lasted 90 minutes, starting with handshakes and quick introductions.
At the end of the second day, we gathered to reach consensus on our top candidates at that point, based on all we knew about them from their own applications, their references, and these interviews. The decision was relatively easy. We chose three candidates for campus visits in January.
In some ways, all that turned out to be the easy part. We had one month, which included the holiday break, to pull together three candidates and spouses and flush out a schedule, a scenario, a list of participants, letters of invitation with the ground rules for the visits, places to hold dinners and conversations, and all the attendant details. We were very much aware of the fact that these visits were much more than interviews -- they were opportunities to sell the candidates on the joys of being part of Lawrence and Appleton, and all this in January!
Miraculously, another subcommittee of the search committee put it all in place, and it came off without a hitch. Once again, we needed to provide a balanced experience here for each of the candidates, and we wanted to get an even assessment of each candidate from the same people at each event. So we insisted that each invitee agree to participate in all three events, to keep all information about the candidates confidential for ever more, and to return to the search committee a form giving their written assessment of the strengths of each candidate and any concerns they had about the candidate. What followed was a bit reminiscent of "Groundhog Day" for those of us participating three times in a row.
The candidates and their spouses started their official visits with a small dinner at our home with a few trustees and spouses. The next morning they had breakfast with Rik and Margot Warch, with the option of indulging in Rik's famous ranch breakfast, followed by a meeting with Rik alone. Then followed 50-minute meetings at 224 North Park with Nancy Truesdell, dean of students; Greg Volk, executive vice president for development and finance; and Steve Syverson, dean of admissions and financial aid; and lunch with Kathy Murray, dean of the faculty and dean of the conservatory. The candidates also met for 50 minutes each with three groups of faculty members of the faculty Governance Committee, senior faculty, and junior faculty. The faculty invitees were chosen primarily by the faculty members of the search committee, who called each of them to discuss their roles before the invitations were sent out. The candidates then met with two groups of college administrators, a group of local alumni, and a small group of trustees. The second night they had dinner in town with community leaders and a few faculty and students. The last morning they had breakfast with a group of students. Their visits ended with lunch and a business discussion with Jeff Riester and me. All three candidates, I should add, expressed interest in Appleton's glorious new Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, and our own intrepid O.C. Boldt obliged with personal tours of the facility.
Meanwhile Jeff Riester, Margaret Carroll, and I began checking many more references on each of the three finalists -- two references on each of the three, or a total of 18 additional reference checks.
Identifying the Finalist for the Position
The evaluation forms from the participants in the campus visits were due to the committee by Friday night, after the last of the three candidate couples had completed their visit. On Saturday morning, January 17, a subcommittee of the search committee met to evaluate the evaluations, a task that my assistant Stephanie Conway had made much easier by compiling a summary spread sheet of comments on each candidate, organized by candidate (strengths and concerns) and within each candidate's sheets by group (faculty, staff, administration, and so on). The subcommittee also read all of the comments filed by all of the participants on all three candidates. Drawing on these opinions from the broader constituencies, and also on their own experience interviewing the candidates and reviewing their references, the members of that subcommittee unanimously decided to recommend the nomination of Jill Beck to the full search committee the next day.
The full search committee met at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, January 18, to hear the subcommittee's summary. On a motion made by Dan Taylor and seconded by Sara Compass, the full committee unanimously voted to recommend to the Board of Trustees the nomination of Jill Beck to be Lawrence's 15th president.
While the search committee waited in the conference room of our offices, I went to my office and called Jill Beck. I reviewed with her all components of the offer which we had discussed in her final interview while she was at Lawrence. She has accepted with great excitement and anticipation, which her husband Rob shares in spades. After that part of our conversation, I put her on speaker phone, and the search committee trooped in and exploded into applause and cheers. Jill was clearly moved and beautifully gracious. She told the committee that we had been her first introduction to Lawrence, and we were the reason she wanted to come.
Final Thoughts
Before I close this report, there are a few other comments. In our final meeting with Jill Beck, we discussed what we felt were the major issues facing Lawrence in the future. This included:
It was important to Jeff Riester and me that there be no surprises due to lack of disclosure on our part.
The cost of the search was budgeted to be $120,000, with $80,000 going to Academic Search. Although we don¹t yet have the final cost, it appears that we will be very close to the budget.
You have received Jill Beck's application materials as well as my report. She is, right now, outside the door waiting to meet all of you. So on behalf of the search committee, I move that the board of trustees appoint Dr. Jill Beck to be the 15th president of Lawrence University, effective on July 1, 2004.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert C. Buchanan
Chair, Presidential Search Committee
For the Search Committee
Return to the Presidential Search Home Page