Less than one week after Kenneth A. Shaw announced his retirement as chancellor of Syracuse University, and nearly 15 months before that retirement takes effect, the search for somebody to fill Buzz’s shoes in SU’s top administrative position has already begun.

When Shaw announced his plans to step down before the University Senate on April 23, he said his successor will be chosen by a search committee led by Board of Trustees Chairman Joe Lampe. That committee will be composed of seven board members, seven faculty, two undergraduate students, one graduate student, one staff member, one dean, one member of the chancellor’s cabinet and one executive secretary.

To do a preliminary search for candidates, the committee will hire a national recruitment firm, Lampe said. The recruitment firm will consider candidates recommended by board members and faculty, as well as any applicants responding to ads placed in publications such as The Chronicles of Higher Education. The firm will then present the search committee with a pool of the most qualified applicants, from which the committee will choose the candidate who can best continue Shaw’s work, Lampe said.

“If the government hadn’t banned cloning, we’d want another Buzz Shaw,” Lampe said.

Before the search officially begins, the board must select the student, faculty and staff representatives that will serve on the committee. That task will fall upon a special subcommittee of the University Senate’s agenda committee. The committee is currently taking nominations for the positions from the university community and will ultimately recommend the candidates to Lampe, said Kathy Zubal-Strang, assistant secretary to the Board.

Nahmin Horwitz, a physics professor and chairman of the agenda committee, said that because of the shortened timetable for the selection process, the USen will not have time to assemble and vote on the student, faculty and staff nominations. Instead, senators will be able to voice their opinion via e-mail before the agenda committee approves the slate of nominees. Horwitz said the hurried nomination process should not have an impact on the quality of the candidates.

”We have to work with what we’re given,” Horwitz said. “I don’t think it would be significantly different if we had had more time.”

While the agenda committee will fill the faculty and staff seats through an open nomination process, it will receive help from the Student Association and Graduate Student Organization in selecting student committee members. The organizations’ respective presidents have collected letters of intent from the student body and will make recommendations to the committee today.

SA President Andrew Thomson has received 12 letters of intent already, many of them from current SA members. He said that students can continue to drop them off in the SA Office until 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Thomson said he will judge the applicants based on their motivations for applying, looking for those with a strong commitment to the university. He was unsure how the candidates will be chosen once he makes his recommendations to the committee, since the SA has never dealt with nominations of this type before.

“We don’t have any process in our codes for appointing people to a committee of this type,” Thomson said.

SA is the only group facing uncharted territory in the search for a new chancellor. With the addition of student representatives, the new search committee is very different in appearance from the one that chose Shaw in 1991 after the retirement of Chancellor Melvin Eggers, Horwitz said. Lampe said he decided to add students to the committee to keep with SU’s goal to become a “student-centered research university.”

The search committee will meet for the first time June 9. An additional requirement for students hoping to be a member of the committee is that they attend the summer meetings as well as those that occur during the academic year, Thomson said. Lampe hopes to have the new chancellor named in less than a year.

“Our goal is to be no later than April of next year,” he said.

Published on April 28, 2003 at 12:00 pm