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A Speedy Search at Ohio State

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By Jennifer Jacobson

Find a new president for a major research university in four months? Most trustees would say it can't be done. But the search committee at Ohio State University just proved them wrong.

In what many observers of the college presidency are calling a remarkably fast search, Ohio State took only four months to find its new leader, Karen A. Holbrook, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia. She will become Ohio State's first female president when she takes office October 1.

On many campuses, an executive search takes at least six months and can stretch into a yearlong ordeal. It took the University of Alabama at Birmingham seven months to name Carol Z. Garrison as its new president. And last month, the state governing board in Mississippi suspended its seven-month-old presidential search at Mississippi State University after board members and its campus search committee couldn't agree on what kind of president to hire. That search will resume in the fall.

But Ohio State's experience proves that "presidential searches needn't be the Bataan death march," says Sheldon E. Steinbach, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education. "References can be checked quickly, the full force of an institution can be brought to bear in an appropriate time, and it needn't be the protracted, painful-for-the-applicants process that it has turned out to be at some institutions."

Jan D. Greenwood, a search consultant who worked with Ohio State, says she has been involved in many searches in which she would leave a phone message for the head of the committee and hear nothing for two weeks. "That slows things down," says Ms. Greenwood, vice president at AT Kearney Executive Search. "It's not the chairs' fault. They are very busy people." But at Ohio State, she says, James F. Patterson, chairman of its search committee, "set aside everything else in his life and made this work. I know not everybody else can do that."

Ohio State's Board of Trustees appointed a search panel in early April, about two weeks after William E. Kirwan announced he would leave in June to become chancellor of the University System of Maryland, says Mr. Patterson, who is chairman of the university's Board of Trustees and owns a farm near Cleveland.

Because five of the committee's 18 members had served on the previous presidential search that named Mr. Kirwan, they had some familiarity with the process. Their experience helped moved things along, says Mr. Patterson, who was one of the five. As soon as the committee was appointed it began talking to various constituencies and developing a presidential profile, even while interviewing search firms. When the committee hired Ms. Greenwood in May, "we were in a position to put the presidential profile together," Mr. Patterson says.

Under Mr. Kirwan's four-year tenure, the university developed an academic plan "geared toward making Ohio State one of the great public universities," Mr. Patterson says. According to the university's Web site, the plan seeks to recruit and retain "top-flight" faculty members by raising salaries, improving the undergraduate experience, and making the institution a leader in biomedical research. "We wanted someone who would come in and not say: 'OK, you've been going down this road. Now you have to go down a different road,'" Mr. Patterson says. "We wanted someone who would come in and be supportive of the academic plan but also take that academic plan to the next level."

To find that person, the search committee compiled a list of more than 100 names and then met face to face with more than a dozen candidates, interviewing Ms. Holbrook toward the end of June.

What also helped speed the search was the fact that Mr. Patterson was the chairman of the university's board as well as of the search committee. That "allowed a lot of things to be expedited that normally would have taken two or three phone calls instead of one," Ms. Greenwood says. "I didn't have to call the chair of the committee then call the chair of the board."

It's becoming more common for board chairmen to take on the leadership of the search committee, she says. "Usually candidates have so many questions," and sometimes only the chairman of the board can answer them. In addition, she says, candidates "want to see who their boss is going to be."

Ms. Greenwood lauded the committee members for being available for conversations with her on short notice, boarding a plane at 5 a.m. to meet with a candidate, for example, and for performing their own candidate research using the Web and not just relying on the materials her search firm provided.

Whenever she starts a search, Ms. Greenwood says, she always jokingly tells the members that "we can close a search in 30 days without a committee. Most of them want to linger. They're concerned that the campus community might get upset, that the faculty might get upset if the committee is moving too quickly."

But Ohio State's search committee didn't mess around. It was 33 days, she says, "from the first conversation they had with a possible candidate until a signed contract, excluding Saturday and Sunday and July 4th," Ms. Greenwood says. It was 50 days "from my first in-person meeting with them until a signed contract." The search "just sort of took on a life of its own," she says. "Everyone had their eye on the big goal."

Ohio State had motivation to move so fast. Other presidential search committees, like the ones at the Universities of Iowa and Minnesota-Twin Cities, had their eye on hiring people for the top job, too. Ms. Greenwood remembers telling the committee that "Karen was on everyone's wish list."