The Board of Regents initiated a presidential search committee and aims to have a candidate hired by May 2025.
The Board of Regents held a special meeting on Oct. 23 to discuss the future president and organize an official presidential search committee. Wanda Bigham, senior consultant and executive coach of Academic Inc., and Margaret Venable, senior consultant of Academic Search Inc., were brought onto the committee to fine-tune the search for a candidate.
Academic Search Inc., based in Washington D.C., specializes in higher education leadership. Bigham said she and Venable are not there to hire but to assist with the search.
“We only do searches for higher education,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to bring leaders into the institution to meet the kind of requirements that are important to the institution. I do not make any decisions, we don’t tell you who to hire, we bring a pool of candidates based on your criteria and wait for you to make that decision.”
Leon Owens, chair of the Board of Regents, discussed the protocol for the search and hiring of the next University president. The committee will work closely with Venable and Bigham for the national search.
By February 2025, the committee and search consultants will identify 10 candidates out of the application pool. In March or April 2025, three to five candidates will be scheduled for campus visits and the committee will gather input from the campus community.
Owens said confidentiality is a high priority during this process.
“The (Board of Regents) meetings are generally open to the public, but we will have closed sessions once we start actually vetting candidates,” he said.
Bigham also said she cannot emphasize the importance of confidentiality enough during this lengthy process.
“We cannot develop a pool of candidates that you want to interview unless you promise that you are going to keep their applications, and all of the information about them, to yourself,” she said. “This is an occasion where people can lose jobs, knowing that you have applied somewhere else. I say to you, at the beginning, these candidates are mine. You will have access to every application, but you cannot reach out to them or others affiliated with them to ask about them. It has to be secure.”
The search consultants plan to publish a profile about the University before Thanksgiving, so applicants have an idea about Murray State.
Venable said recruiting is pertinent to this process to find the best fit for this open position.
“We will be sending out emails and making phone calls to identify people that may be interested, so we need at least six weeks to properly answer any questions these applicants may have,” she said. “Between the time that it is published and mid-January, we’ll be recruiting and that will be a silent phase from the committee and campus perspective. No one will really be seeing much until that meeting when (the committee) has reviewed applications and you’re ready to identify semifinalists.”
Regents were asked to provide feedback on a drafted profile of the University and job description for the open position by the end of the business day on Oct. 25.
