The search for Temple’s next President is now well underway, and many faculty members and others in the Temple community are asking:  Has the Board learned from its recent missteps?  What role will there be for voices outside of the Board in making this most important decision?  What does Temple need from our next President, and how will the Search Advisory Committee and the Board increase the likelihood that we will get what we need?

Those questions were addressed, if not answered, on October 25^th. Approximately 40 faculty members and librarians gathered on Zoom and in person at the Center for Anti-Racism in Mazur Hall to have a discussion sponsored by the Faculty Senate about the search with Chair of the Board, Mitch Morgan, and Jane Scaccetti, member of the Board and the Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee. The leadership of the Senate deserves praise for making this event happen, and I hope they will build on it, continuing to insist on a strong voice from faculty and librarians as this process unfolds.

Because it is not clear if this event was on the record, I will not quote the trustees or the participants directly except for two important statements from Chairman Morgan.   

At the start of the meeting, Chairman Morgan admitted that the Board had not done a great job in its most recent search and added, “We can’t get this wrong, and we need your help.”

This is a welcome statement, and our university would certainly profit from a more collaborative stance from the Board after so many difficult years and mistakes. It remains to be seen whether the Board will truly listen to the faculty and the other stakeholders who should be involved in this discussion. 

There are some positive signs in that direction. The 10/25 meeting itself is one. Not only the fact that it happened at all but also the frankness and substantiveness of the exchanges. Another good sign is that Collective Genius, the other firm employed along with Spencer Stuart, has made good on its promise to publish the results of its many listening sessions and survey responses. There are also fewer trustees on this search committee than on the last one. 

Yet there are also troubling indications that the mistakes of the past will be repeated. We should be grateful to all serving on the Search Advisory Committee,  and especially to our two faculty representatives, Shohreh Amini and Quaiser Abdullah. But 10 of the 16 members are trustees, and six of those were on the prior search. While the addition of Deans is a wise move, there are only two faculty members, one fewer than on the last search. (The third faculty member was added only after a justified protest at the lack of diversity on the committee). There are no graduate or professional students. There are no staff members below the Vice Presidential level.

There are no members from the North Philadelphia community, though it is good that Pedro Ramos, the CEO of the Philadelphia Foundation has been appointed. He will bring a deep and broad knowledge of the challenges facing Philadelphia to the search. These are things that our new President must grasp. It is unclear whether he or anyone else on the committee has the necessary insight into Temple’s relationship to its neighbors, which remains unacceptably poor despite some recent efforts to improve it. 

Also problematic is that there is currently no plan to bring finalists to campus for some sort of interaction with the university community.

Some points of comparison with searches at other universities

As the search proceeds, it’s instructive to look at examples from other institutions.  I assume the Board has done so, but it has perhaps missed a few useful models. 

It’s true that many other presidential searches are similarly trustee-heavy. For instance, Penn State’s recent search, also facilitated by Spencer Stuart, filled 12 of its 18 slots with trustees; there were no deans (a mistake), and, as with Temple’s search, only one student and two faculty members. 

Yet many excellent institutions have gone in a more open and balanced direction. 

In their recently concluded search, Wayne State—like Temple, an urban research university—included only four trustees out of its 16 search committee members and had three faculty members, including the President of its faculty labor union, a staff member, who is identified as a member of SEIU (a labor union), and two community members. 

In its most recent search, The University of South Carolina had a balance of eight trustees and five faculty members, a bit better than our current 10:2. 

Then, there’s Pomona College. I mention it not because of the makeup of its search committee but because of its more open process. Despite some resistance from their search firm—Spencer Stuart, as it happens—the committee insisted on bringing the finalists to campus so that the community could meet them and offer feedback.

Kevin Dettmar, a faculty member on the search, and, Sam Glick, the Chair of their Board wrote an article on their experience. They acknowledged the fear that this more open process might lead candidates to withdraw for fear of backlash if their interest in another job was made known: “Once informed of our decision to hold open town-hall meetings, none of the finalists chose to leave the search. We didn’t “lose” our best candidate: Reader, we hired her.”  That successful candidate, by the way, was G. Gabrielle Starr, the first woman and African-American to lead Pomona; she remains its president six years later. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has emerged as a leading voice for affirmative action and for the inter-relation between the humanities and the sciences. 

Other notable institutions that invited finalists to campus during recent searches include Penn State (which had them meet with a select group of faculty), Louisianna State, and Ohio University. One remarkable example—Pitzer College, which not only brought its finalists to campus but also “gave its entire full-time faculty and representative groups of staff members and students the opportunity to meet with three finalists and weigh in on the final choice.”

I sent the Chronicle article on the Pomona search to Trustees Morgan and Scaccetti at their request after I mentioned it in the 10/25 meeting. Their request suggests that the Board may indeed be listening to the faculty. There were other signs of this in their responses to the rich suggestions they received when they asked what we should be looking for in a new President. They were keen to hear names of potential candidates, and many in the audience offered them.

According to the recent update from Senate President Amini, “The search advisory committee met in December 2023, and reviewed the applications. The committee will meet again in January 2024 to review applications/candidates (both internal and external) and identify those to interview.” I have been informed that the nomination process is still open; nominations can be sent to TemplePresident@SpencerStuart.com.

Finding a President Who “Is In Love With Temple’s Mission”

Whether or not the Board rightly makes this search more inclusive and open, a key question, perhaps the key question—is what qualities the search committee and the Board are looking for in Temple’s next President. During the 10/25 meeting, it was clear that Trustees Morgan and Scaccetti are seeking a President who in Morgan’s apt words “is in love with Temple’s mission.” 

As the exchanges during the meeting showed, there is much to debate over what our mission is, how it might be realized, and what sort of candidate might best realize it. For instance: Do we need someone with a terminal degree with the publication and teaching record necessary to be tenured here? Or would it be okay to have someone familiar with and respectful of innovative research, creative activity, and teaching and who will appoint a capable Provost? The complexity and high stakes of these debates are two reasons why it’s so important that the process be as inclusive and transparent as possible. 

But however those debates are settled, these two Trustees have it right:  It’s crucial that our next President understand and love Temple’s unique mssion. 

That mission is crystallized in a tagline frequently heard of late from the administration, though honored more in the breach than the observance:  We are Philadelphia’s public research university. That means that we marry support for innovative research and creative activity with the Conwellian mission to open the gates of the university to the broadest population of students. And we embrace the fact that we are located in Philadelphia and North Philadelphia in particular. However much we rightly may look to Penn and Penn State and other excellent universities for lessons in what to do and what not to do, Temple’s history and mission are unique.  

Being the President of any university in 2024 is an extraordinarily demanding job, and being the President of Temple poses unusual challenges, among them:  

• the current dip in traditional college-age students in our area, projected to continue for at lest a few more years; although we knew this was coming for nearly two decades, our central administration seems to have done too little to prepare for it, though we all hope that our new Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, Dr. Jose Aviles, is helping to reverse the tide; 
• a large medical system that has historically struggled to break even and is not sufficiently supported by the Commonwealth or the city;
• a budget system, Responsibility Centered Management, that has failed to deliver on its promises of transparency, fairness, and more power for the colleges and schools;
• concerns over the headcounts and expense of high-earning administrators—see, for instance, the most recent Stairs report—and the FY 24 budget, which calls for much deeper cuts to schools and colleges (chief site for the core of our educational mission) than to central administration;
• a faculty who rightly feel undervalued in a variety of ways, especially contingent faculty, as reflected not only in recent firings/non-renewals and the negotiations over the TAUP contract but also the lack of shared governance;
• needlessly-antagonistic relationships with TUGSA and other unions;
• lingering bad feelings from how employees were treated during COVID and the TUGSA strike;
• declining financial support from the Commonwealth, which currently provides only around 12% of our operating budget, despite currently sitting on an historic surplus. Our funding has been flat the past few years, which means an inflationary cut;
• profound recent dysfunction in the Research Office, though we hope it will be remedied with the new Vice President for Research, Dr. Josh Gladden;
• crime in North Philadelphia, which is a real problem that has affected our enrollments but is also exploited by those with an interest in stigmatizing Black and Brown communities.

But with all these significant challenges come Temple’s inspiring qualities, including: 

• the excellence of our faculty, full-time and part-time, and librarians as researchers, teachers, and academic citizens;
• our remarkable students, graduate and undergraduate, who teach us so much as we teach them;
• dedicated and talented administrators and staff; while it’s fair to raise questions about administrative expenses and overreach, we also need to avoid demonizing administrators and staff and scanting their contributions; 
• our strong network of alumni, particularly in Philadelphia;
• our proud Conwellian tradition of combining research excellence with educational access;
• our vibrant diversity in all senses of that word;
• unique archives like the Blockson Collection and the Urban Archives;
• our home in one of the world’s great cities (yes—Philadelphia is one of the greatest cities in the world) and in close proximity to other great cities; 
• our international reach with campuses in Rome and Tokyo and partnerships elsewhere. 

So we will need a President who embraces Temple’s vision and inspires others do so; who can be a charismatic public face of the university when dealing with elected officials and donors; who understands the complexities and the importance of research, creative activity, graduate and undergraduate teaching, and service; who knows their way around a medical system even if not expert in its workings; who knows how to speak respectfully with our neighbors and forge real alliances with them. 

This is a very difficult list of qualities to find in any one person, but we must try, and we must trust that if our new President does not have all of these qualities they will have the wisdom and humility to pick people who do. 

It’s up to the Search Advisory Committee and the Board to find this person. Let’s hope they have the wisdom and humility to make good on Chairman Morgan’s admirable admission that they need help in doing so. Let’s demand that they keep the Temple community involved and informed.  Because, as he says, we can’t get this wrong again.