Students stress need for student, staff involvement
The search firm chosen by the Presidential Search Committee recently hosted virtual stakeholder forums.
Spelman Johnson, the search firm in charge of selecting a pool of university president candidates, hosted several forums with students, faculty and staff to gather information on the qualities the campus community would like to see in a future university president. The student stakeholder meetings were 11 a.m. Oct. 9 and 9 a.m. Oct. 12 via Zoom.
Ellen Heffernan, president of Spelman Johnson, and Anne-Marie Kenney, consultant for Spelman Johnson, hosted and led the student meetings. Abby Banks, political science/philosophy/economics junior and Student Government Association president, moderated the meetings.
The forums started with Heffernan and Kenney introducing themselves and Spelman Johnson to the students and explaining what the selection process for the new president will look like.
“Once we finish the stakeholder conversations, we’ll draft a series of documents that sort of enumerate the themes that we heard and help us to sort of define and articulate what’s important when we identify candidates for the role,” Heffernan said in the meeting.
Heffernan said Spelman Johnson will launch a full, nationwide search for candidates based on the conversations in the stakeholder meetings. As they start building a pool of candidates, Heffernan said Spelman Johnson and the Presidential Search Committee will review and interview the candidates. Heffernan said the new president will ideally be chosen in March of 2021.
“The timeline for this, we are sort of finalizing that right now. We anticipate launching the search toward the end of October/the start of November, and then we’ll recruit all the way through until January. And from there, we will start to work with the search committee,” Heffernan said in the meeting. “Ultimately, the Board of Trustees will make the decision.”
After their introduction, Heffernan and Kenney asked the attending students questions, such as what challenges and opportunities a new university president might have with OCU, if it would matter to students if the president was not from Oklahoma, and what draws students to OCU. The forum ended with a Q&A session led and moderated by Banks.
Reid Powell, political science junior and vice president of SGA, said the meeting went well.
“I really appreciated that Spelman Johnson seemed to really care about what students had to say and how students felt about who we should hire as our next president of the university,” Powell said.
Powell said he brought up some of his concerns about the lack of student and appropriate staff representation on the Presidential Search Committee during the forum.
“If there’s no staff or student on that search committee, how can we know for certain that the issues we’re presenting in this meeting are actually being taken seriously within the Presidential Search Committee,” he said. “I want to make sure that all voices are being heard and considered.”
Abby Banks said one of the most important qualities she would like to see in the next OCU president is servant leadership, a quality which she admires about current OCU President Martha Burger.
“That’s something that I really value as an individual, something that I want to carry throughout my life, is servant leadership,” Banks said. “I’m graduating this year, so even though I won’t be here whenever that next president is going to be here, I think it is really important to continue that legacy.”
Trae Trousdale, mass communications/political science senior, attended both the Oct. 9 and 12 forums. He said it is important for students to engage with the presidential selection process.
“This is something that is going to have a direct impact on campus life for the next four years at least,” Trousdale said. “A new president is a large impact in the direction of the institution, and so I think, as of right now, this is the only time that we’ve been clued in to the fact that students are going to be listened to and students have that representation, and this is the only time we have a guaranteed voice because it is happening as we speak.”
For more information on the Presidential Search Committee or the search itself, students, staff and faculty can visit the Presidential Search Committee page on the OCU website.
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