The inauguration of Dr. Claudia Limbert as President of Mississippi University for Women will mark the beginning of the second round the search for a new president at Mississippi State University. The ceremony at the Columbus campus will be held in conjunction with a meeting of the Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), the state agency in charge of public universities. IHL board members have said they will officially resume the MSU search at the Oct. 16-17 meeting.
“We won’t know much until the board meets in Columbus,” Frances Coleman, Dean of MSU Libraries and Chair of the MSU Campus Advisory Search Committee, said. “We will be starting over then, and the board will set a new timetable.”
“We hope to get the search going by January,” Bryce Griffis, President of the IHL board, said. “Our consultants tell us that is the best time, as people prefer to move at the end of a semester.”
Griffis said that the board hopes to hire during the spring semester and begin the transition during the summer.
Both Coleman and Griffis say they want students to be up to date on the search process.
“This is an open search,” Coleman said. “We want to keep the university community informed of its progress.”
No major changes are expected for the new search. Both Griffis and Coleman said that the same people should make up the second MSU Campus Advisory Search Committee and that the procedures for interviewing should remain the same. Candidates from the first search will be allowed to try again.
“The application is open to anyone,” Griffis says. Neither Coleman nor Griffis would say whether Interim President J. Charles Lee is a candidate for the full presidency.
The second search should be less expensive. “We spent about $100,000,” Griffis said. “We won’t spend nearly as much this time. We won’t have all those consultants’ fees to pay.”
IHL board members voted to suspend the search at their July 8 meeting, after spending two weeks interviewing candidates for the position. Board members were unable to reach an agreement on any of the candidates for the position. The search was officially scrapped at an IHL retreat in August.
“We know what we want in a good president,” Griffis said about the previous search. “We just could not agree that any of the candidates were right for the job. This is a very important decision, and I think people appreciate us taking the time to select the right person for the job.”
Each candidate was recommended by the MSU Campus Advisory Search Committee, which was appointed by the IHL board to screen applicants for the position and recommend semi-finalists for the board’s review. That committee is composed of MSU students, faculty, administrators and other civic leaders that have a close relationship to the university.
MSU was left without a president after the resignation of its 16th top executive, Malcolm Portera, who left to take the chancellorship with the University of Alabama system last November.
Both Coleman and Griffis stressed that Interim President Lee is serving the university well. “Mississippi State is lucky to have someone like Dr. Lee,” Coleman said.
“Dr. Lee is doing a fine job,” Griffis said. “Under his leadership, we are far from facing any kind of crisis.