The presidential search committee will soon begin a series of off-campus airport interviews with 10 individuals who applied to be SRU’s next president.
According to Jeff Smith, SRU council of trustee member and presidential search chair, 57 applications were received by the Dec. 31 deadline. The firm helping the committee, AGB Search, set up a website for members to look at the various applicants’ information. The search committee then met on Jan. 12 and sent their top 10 list to AGB Search.
“We talked about each of those (candidates) and the pros and cons of each of those people and then we tried to decide is this someone we definitely want to interview or somebody this would be nice to interview,” Smith said. “Of the 57 I bet over 50 of them were definitely qualified for the position, but this was a case of is this somebody that we really want to see?”
The search committee then formed a final top 10 list that was compiled at the meeting, and will begin meeting the candidates in off-campus airport interviews.
“We will meet with those 10 at an off-site location and from that we expect to have 4-5 people do the on-campus interviews like we had done last time,” Smith said.
Smith said that when the candidates came to campus lat semester there was originally supposed to be 4-5, but only 3 ended up interviewing on campus after some dropped out at the last minute.
“It was unfortunate,” Smith said. “I think if we would have had more than three on campus the search probably would have been successful last time. There were just some unfortunate things that happened that caused it to blow up at the end. I still think we had some pretty good candidates on the last search.”
Smith said on-campus interviews will begin the week of Feb. 12 and that the whole schedule for the visits will be coming out in the next few weeks, with the process being similar to that of the fall semester, with candidates meeting different members of the campus community.
“I’m very confident that at this point we’ll be successful and that sometime in March the search will be done,” Smith said. “This search there’s some really incredibly impressive people on this list.”
More information and future updates regarding the search process can be found here.
