The LSU presidential search committee convened on Wednesday for its second official meeting as the process toward selecting a new university president after the departure of former President William Tate IV continued.
The meeting invited a lively student protest, led primarily by members of LSU’s Students for a Democratic Society, many of whom spoke during the public comment period. When one member refused to yield her time and was arrested, six more peers followed her outside and seven total students were arrested.
Chairman Scott Ballard said during the meeting that the search committee’s interviews with candidates selected by SSA Consultants of Baton Rouge, the consulting firm selected by LSU to lead the search for candidates, will be held from Oct. 10-20. Ballard said the plan would be to deliver recommendations to the Board of Supervisors by Oct. 21.
The Board of Supervisors may then vote to select the next LSU president at its Oct. 24 meeting.
The search committee has two scheduled meetings on Oct. 29 and Nov. 12 and Ballard had previously estimated the committee would produce a recommendation by December, but the timeline has apparently tightened, and the next two meetings may not be necessary.
The meeting was spent emphasizing the criteria the school is looking for in a potential candidate. SSA CEO Christel Slaughter asked committee members for their top three characteristics in LSU’s next president, noting the importance of hearing out the committee’s opinions before furthering the process.
“[The people who have expressed interest in the position] are not applicants at this point,” Slaughter said. “They will not become applicants until we hear from you what your criteria is, what your priorities are, and go back and apply that to all the people in the pool of interested parties,”
The meeting continued with the committee expressing their thoughts on what they would want to see in the university’s potential new president, which are also listed on page 6 of LSU’s official search profile.
“Administratively, I think it would be important that they have oversight in academics… as we’re looking towards top 50 [research university],” said committee member Daniel Tirone, the Faculty Senate president at LSU and an associate professor. “The key here is the faculty and administrative ability to enable and to mentor the faculty to reach their true potential.”
There was an overwhelming agreement on what the committee wants out of interested parties, but some committee members seemed to take issue with the lack of information given by SSA to the committee on the candidates and how they were being screened.
Slaughter told the committee that there are around 20 interested parties, all of whom have yet to apply.
“SSA goes through those, and the search committee only gets a narrow number, so the search committee is never going to know the entire pool of applicants,” said James Williams, past chair of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
Slaughter confirmed that this will be the process going forward. The SSA will go through all potential applicants and narrow them down for the committee to choose between only a handful of candidates.
