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Batten, College, Architecture dean searches underway

Candidates outside, inside University under consideration

	<p>The Batten School is housed in Garrett Hall, above. </p>

The Batten School is housed in Garrett Hall, above.

University officials have established search committees to find replacements for Dean Meredith Woo of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dean Harry Harding of the Batten School for Public Policy and Dean Kim Tanzer of the Architecture School. All three deans will not seek reappointment when their terms end in the next several months.

Though each search committee will look for dean candidates independently, Senior Vice Provost Milton Adams said, Provost John Simon and University President Teresa Sullivan will choose from among the final candidates and make their offers.

“[The search committee will] advertise,” Adams said. “In some cases, they may have a firm that would help them identify people, candidates … nationally or internationally for the deanships.”

Applicants for the position at the College come from faculty members’ nominations, both from within the University and from other schools. The University has also advertised through The Chronicle for Higher Education and Witt/Kieffer, an executive search consulting firm, said English Prof. Jahan Ramazani, chair of the search committee for the College.

“I feel very good about how the search is going so far,” Ramazani said. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of interest among applicants and that speaks to the prestige of the University and also the tremendous opportunity here.”

The new College dean will be responsible for managing the school’s $185 million operating budget, as well as nearly 10,000 students and 750 faculty members. The new dean will also hire close to 200 faculty members in the next five years, Ramazani said.

The 20-person search committee for the College includes an undergraduate representative, a graduate representative, several alumni, faculty members, the head of athletics and staff members, all of whom were appointed by the Provost. Ramazani said it was crucial to the process to have students and alumni included in the search committee.

“If you can only talk to other administrators, it’s not going to work,” Ramzani said. “We need someone who is able to listen to the aspirations and the views of the faculty, students, alumni, administrators, etc. to build and shape the future of the institution.”

There are advantages and disadvantages to selecting a candidate from the University’s pool of faculty members, Adams said.

“It’s kind of a mix,” Adams said. “When someone comes from inside, then an obvious strength is that they’re familiar with the way U.Va. works, the people who are here and what some of the issues are. But, just as obviously, someone coming in from outside would bring new thoughts, new ideas, new methods.”

Adams said he is confident that the search committee, Provost and President will finish the process by the time the departing deans exit their current positions.

The search committee at the Batten School has a similar makeup to the College search committee, with faculty from the school, the Provost’s office and other departments, an undergraduate student and a graduate student, said Education Prof. David Breneman, search committee chair.

The 16-member search committee is working with Russell Reynolds Associates, a firm that finds and assesses executives for positions, Breneman said.

Besides those the firm have identified as qualified, nominees can come from members of the search committee, or they can be nominated by faculty members.

“If somebody knows about the position and wants to be a candidate, they might ask a friend to nominate them,” Breneman said. “We kept open the possibility of self-nomination.”

Not everybody who is nominated will be invited to become a candidate for the position, and not everyone who is nominated wants to run for the position.

Established in 2007, the Batten School hired 14 faculty members in its first five years. The new dean will be involved in the continuing process of hiring several more full-time Batten faculty in the next few years.

The Batten School search committee met Thursday night for nearly five hours to assess the initial pool of candidates. Breneman said they began with 39 candidates and their materials. Each committee member was assigned two or three candidates to present.

“We then triaged the candidates — ones we definitely wanted to interview, ones we definitely didn’t want to interview … and some we were mixed on,” Breneman said. “We wound up with approximately 16 or 17 people.”

After an off-site interview and extensive reference-checks, the committee will further narrow the pool.

“Our job at that point is to decide who we think the three strongest candidates are, and then we present those names to the President and the Provost … and then its up to them — they make the final call,” Breneman said.

The new Batten school dean will manage an operating budget of $8.97 million.

At the moment, all of the Batten school candidates are from outside the University community, Breneman said.

“It is conceivable that an internal candidate will emerge, but that will only happen if we didn’t find what we were looking for externally,” he said.

Breneman said there are three categories of candidates sought by the Batten School search committee.

“[The first group are those] who pretty much follow the straight academic career … who have mainly done research and writing and teaching,” Breneman said. “The second group we’ve opened up to people who have excellent academics, but have pursued careers outside of academia … people who have had really stellar leadership roles. The third category are people who are sort of hybrids … who have a mixture of experiences.”

Architecture Prof. Shiqiao Li is heading the search committee at the Architecture School. Li said the committee does not have a preference on hiring from within or outside the University.

“We don’t really make a distinction,” Li said.

The Architecture School search committee is assessing scholars and candidates with more practical experience, Li said.

“You can sometimes get a combination of the two, but usually a person would have a leaning toward one aspect or the other,” Li said. “There are certain aspirations of the school that the person should be able to understand and capture.”

The new dean will have charge of the Architecture School’s $9.8 million budget.

Li said a dean in the Architecture school would need to have “the sense of the profession of architecture.”

The current deans for each school are set to step down at the end of this academic year in May.

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