UI Presidential candidates: a brief guide
Four finalists visited the University of Iowa over the last two weeks to make their pitch to be the next president of the university.
Welcome back one and all to your well-scheduled and always-on-time campus newsletter.
All of the candidates for the coveted position of University of Iowa president have now visited campus, and we saw a lot of common themes in their messages — here’s the rundown:
Hari Osofsky
Osofsky holds dual dean positions: both as the dean of Penn State Law, and the dean of the Penn State International Programs.
Her CV is long and accomplished: She’s a Yale graduate, both for her undergrad and law school. She took up the post at Penn State in 2017, and has had stints at the University of Minnesota, Washington Lee University, University of Oregon, and others.
One thing she brought up frequently was her work at Penn State to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion goals after last summer’s calls for police reform and racial justice. She worked with student groups and other deans on a list of specific steps for boosting DEI, and helped set up a George Floyd Memorial Scholarship.
Muddy political waters: Osofsky on multiple occasions referenced political differences and disagreements and their role in higher education. Higher ed has certainly become a political wedge issue, with more committed conservatives in Iowa’s Legislature consistently demonizing higher ed, going so far as proposing freezing funding for Iowa’s public universities.
This diplomatic approach to the issue was not appreciated by everyone.
Barbara Wilson
Wilson is the executive vice president and provost at the University of Illinois system.
She has a background in journalism, and graduated with a bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before coming to Illinois she worked at the University of Louisville and UC Santa Barbara.
As far as direct credentials, Wilson may be the most qualified of the pack: In addition to being provost of a three-university system with 90,000 students for several years, she spent more than a year as interim chancellor — the equivalent of the UI president — of Urbana-Champaign after the chancellor resigned under controversy.
Wilson drew on that experience a lot at her forum, saying she focuses on building teams and making decisions collaboratively — bringing in stakeholders across campus to get to the best answers.
Wendy Hensel
Hensel is the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Georgia State University. She’s spent most of her time at Georgia State after working professionally in the legal world.
Hensel made a point to talk about increasing graduation rates, both in general and for people from marginalized groups. She mentioned how she made strides to close the achievement gap along racial lines. According to Edtech, the graduation rate for African American men at GSU went from 18 percent to 55 percent over a 16-year period.
Technology and innovation were how Hensel said she could meet these goals: She mentioned that GSU had instituted a chatbot to answer admitted students’ questions about the process of beginning their first semester on campus. The bot had dozens of automated answers for questions students might have, and if an answer was not programmed a staff member would provide the answer.
Daniel Clay
The lone inside candidate, Daniel Clay is the dean of the College of Education at the UI. Before coming to the UI, he had the same post at Mizzou.
Clay appealed to his status as an insider as a qualification for the job. He knows the campus, and he knows the people on campus, and he pitched himself as someone who wouldn’t take long to learn the ropes.
He also tried to draw a contrast between himself and Bruce Harreld. Talking about the protests last summer, which largely took place on campus, Clay said the UI “should have had a more prominent presence.” Harreld was no where to be seen — at least publicly — while that all went down.
Like Harreld, Clay also has a strong business background. “Entrepreneurship” was a titled section of his CV, and he says he has “experience as a business founder/co-founder and investor.” One of those endeavors, Mizzou Academy, was an attempt to boost international enrollment at Mizzou. The operation mostly failed and is now embroiled in a lawsuit from a Brazilian business partner.
Some early observations about the pool:
Everyone who was a finalist has some level of academic experience. That was the biggest concern people had going in, as Harreld, primarily a business consultant, hadn’t had any administrative experience at a university before he came to town.
Three out of four are women. This, again, is a departure from 2015. The UI has had women in the top spot before, most recently Sally Mason, but last time, all the potential candidates were men.
All the finalists are white. For all the emphasis the search committee and each of them put on diversity, equity, and inclusion, this is not a diverse pool of candidates. As Vanessa Miller of the Gazette noted, we also don’t know how diverse the applicant pool was.
Now that we’ve seen all the finalists, there’s only a week left until the big day. On April 30, if all goes to plan, the state Board of Regents will name the next president. I’ll try to muster up another newsletter on that fateful day. But until then, that’s all I’ve got.