As the national race for president continues, so does the search for the next head of Texas A&M University-Commerce.
In an e-mail to faculty and staff last week, David Crenshaw, president of Faculty Senate and chair of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee, said the committee had spent nearly five hours on Feb. 13 “distilling the list of candidates” that had applied for the position of president of the University.
Crenshaw said he thought the group was making progress in its search.
“We started out with 36 applications from all over the country,” he said. “About two weeks ago, we whittled those down to 17. At that time, we split up the ones who made that first cut and each contacted references.”
The search committee members asked each of the references a standard group of questions and reviewed them this past week.
“Then we eliminated the list down to a field of eight,” Crenshaw said, adding the committee also chose a pair of alternate candidates in case any of the original eight should withdraw from the process.
Those selected will receive invitations to an off site interview that will take place in early March. After the interviews, the field should be narrowed further to two or three possible choices that would each be able to lead the University, Crenshaw said.
According to Crenshaw, the final group of names will then be given to the Chancellor of the A&M System Mike McKinney who will review the choices and then forward his recommendations to the Board of Regents. The Board will then consider those suggestions and move forward with its selection of those candidates for interviews on the University’s campus.
“Only then will any names be revealed and even then it will only be the one(s) invited to campus. All others will remain forever confidential,” Crenshaw said in an e-mail interview. “After the on-campus interviews, we hope the Regents will then name a president.’
Crenshaw said the list of earlier candidates would remain confidential because the application guaranteed their anonymity until the final round of interviews.
“The main reason for confidentiality is that these candidates are all secure in high-ranking jobs within their university. The fact that they are in a search process is in most cases a secret on their campus. If it were to become public that they were at least toying with another job would probably cause embarrassment and lead to their pulling of their application. They have applied with the promise of security and we cannot break that promise,” he said.
If all goes according to plan, the University should have a new president by late April.
And what is the committee looking for in the next president?
“We are looking for someone who can lead a university that has multiple sites that it is involved with … we need someone who appreciates graduate type degrees and not just a bachelor’s-granting institution. We need someone who will embrace our strategic plan that we spent so much time on,” Crenshaw said. He also said the search firm’s representatives spent a great deal of time on the campus speaking with faculty, alumni and others “to get a picture of what this University was” and “What kind of individual it was going to take to go forward.”
In seeking potential candidates, the University has hired Academic Search. On the company’s Web site, www.academic-search.com, the list of expectations of the new president mirrors Crenshaw’s words and also includes being “politically astute and effective in building relationships locally, statewide, and nationally on behalf of the universityî as well as emphasis on fundraising, promoting A&M-Commerce, and “active involvement in the local community as a leader and cooperating partner in community development.”
“We are looking for a dynamic president who can increase funding for the university from a variety of sources; one who is a strategic planner and a visionary who can inspire the campus and aid in a new branding campaign. We want a president who hires good people who share the vision of the university and then empowers them to succeed without micromanaging,” Crenshaw said. “As I said on a recent KETV Talk of the Town Show, we want an individual who ‘walks on water.'”
To view the prospectus for the job posting on Academic Search’s Web site, visit http://www.academic-search.org/PDFs/Profiles/TAMUCProfile.pdf