ECSU Chancellor
vacancy already drawing applicants
By Corinne
Saunders
The Daily
Advance
Monday, March
31, 2014
The vacant
chancellor’s job at Elizabeth City State University is already drawing
applicants, including a couple of former university presidents, the committee
searching for ECSU’s next leader learned last week.
The
chancellor job posting has been placed on five different websites, drawing an
unspecified number of applicants, some from as far away as Michigan, Florida and
Alabama, according to representatives of the search firm hired to orchestrate
the search.
“We’ve
definitely begun the search process,” Allen Sessoms, senior vice president of
The Hollins Group, told the ECSU Chancellor Search Committee by conference call
on Friday. “We’re seeing results already.”
The Hollins
Group placed a 330-word job ad March 25 on the websites Diverse Issues in Higher
Education, Inside Higher Ed and HigherEdJobs. The ad was also placed on The
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education website March 27 and on the American
Conference of Academic Deans website March 28.
On April 4,
the ad is slated to appear both in the print edition and on the website of The
Chronicle of Higher Education, according to Tiffany Olson, director of research
and client services for The Hollins Group.
Olson told
search committee members over the phone that the online ads will stay up for 60
days. That timeframe actually means the ads will be up after the April 30
application deadline, Sessoms noted.
He said
search committees “very often” choose to extend the closing date by a couple
weeks, adding that typically, several candidates will apply after the closing
date, and the extension will provide the search committee with more
options.
Olson said
that the search firm will start “populating the website” with candidate
applications, which then will be made viewable to search committee members at a
future date she did not specify.
“We screen
them as they come in, so we do develop a hierarchal list as they come in,”
Sessoms said of applications, noting that The Hollins Group completes a
preliminary background check on applicants.
“They’re
going to make recommendations, but they won’t eliminate any candidates,” Ann
Lemmon, secretary of the University of North Carolina, who also was on the call,
noted.
Sessoms
echoed Lemmon, stating that The Hollins Group will simply make note of which
applicants it considers the strongest.
In recent
experience, Sessoms said that of 50 to 60 applicants, “a dozen of them or so
will be strong,” but that “with the attributes of Elizabeth City State, it
wouldn’t surprise me if there were more than that.”
Once the
committee goes through the applications, members will choose candidates for the
first round of interviews, typically conducted at an airport because of its
convenience to out-of-town applicants.
Lemmon noted
that during the approximately 1.5-hour interviews, it is typical to ask
candidates 10 to 12 questions, which are chosen by search committees. Lemmon
said she has a list of about 30 questions that were used in previous UNC system
chancellor searches.
The ECSU
chancellor search committee agreed that Lemmon should send the 30 questions to
The Hollins Group for vetting. The firm in turn will provide questions to the
search committee during a conference call scheduled for April
11.
The committee
agreed to designate a subcommittee to choose and to personalize the questions
for ECSU by April 25 — the date of the next committee
meeting.
“You really
want to tailor the questions to your mission statement,” Lemmon said, explaining
that UNC-Chapel Hill’s search committee asked numerous questions about research,
while the University of North Carolina School of the Arts committee asked a lot
of questions about performance.
Abdul
Rasheed, chairman of both the search committee and ECSU’s Board of Trustees,
asked when the names of candidates will be presented to the full trustee
board.
Lemmon said
after the search committee narrows the candidate pool to three names, trustees
will either approve them and pass them on to UNC President Tom Ross or will send
the names back to the search committee.
According to
the committee’s proposed timeline, the plan is to present the three names to the
trustee board in August.
# #
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Kesha
Williams
Director
of Media Relations| University Relations and Marketing
Elizabeth
City State University
1704
Weeksville Rd. | Elizabeth City, NC 27909
Phone:
252.335.3686 | Fax: 252.335.3769
