It's Up to the VSC

While Lyndon State College wants input on its next president, it can only contribute so much.

            In an update about Lyndon State College's presidential search, Vermont State Colleges' Chancellor, Tim Donovan, stressed that it is the board of trustee's responsibility to hire a new president.

            "This is the board of trustees search for a president for Lyndon," said Donovan. "It is not Lyndon's search for the president of Lyndon. That authority is vested in the board of trustees in statute."

            He asked the assembled students, faculty and staff to trust the board.

            "Judge the outcome, not the input," said Donovan. "We are going to be looking for the best possible person to match up where this institution is headed and can head. We are really going to be looking for the long-term, in terms of the long-term health and prosperity of this institution."

            He then went on to give a brief timeline of the next few months of the newly appointed search committee, including starting the search in the beginning of November.

            "That group is going to meet for the first time on the 13 or 14 (of October) and that will be a process group to get people together," said Donovan. "One of the things I'm going to remind them of is that the work of that committee will be considered private and secret. Under the Vermont open meetings law it can be because it involves personnel actions."

            The committee will eventually release who it is looking at.

"When we get to the point where there are a number of people that we are going to invite to the college to interview then their names and their backgrounds will become public information," he said.

            In the mean time there will be a filtering process of potential candidates that starts with the chancellor.

            "The board asks me to do an initial review of applications and to eliminate any that I think are not worth considering," said Donovan. "I have historically set that bar very low, but they've asked me to raise it with each search we've done a little bit."

Finding presidents for the other VSC schools has gone smoothly in the past.

            "The last two searches that we have done I have had in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 of what I would call good applications," said Donovan. "They tend to narrow down pretty quickly to somewhere around 15 that we will do phone interviews with as a search committee. From that we will identify finalists that we want to start to talk to seriously."

            When the pool of applicants has been dwindled down to a few finalists those chosen will visit LSC.

            "When we bring finalists to the campus there will be the ability in that setting for you to have input as well," he said. "That will be students, staff and faculty."

            Having a president for 13 years retire has left the school unsure how to proceed, as many here have not gone through the process.

            "In this system if we take the presidents that have been in place, I had an eight year run at the community college, Dave Walk's been at Castleton for 10 years, Barbara Murphy's been at Johnson 11 years and was at CCV eight years before that," Donovan said. "On one hand I count our blessings that we don't do this all the time. As much as anything else, I want to assure you that this is a pretty normal thing and it is a really exciting thing."