Dartmouth's Board of Trustees will begin to solicit input from all members of the Dartmouth community regarding criteria for the selection of the College's next president on Friday, Board Chairman Ed Haldeman '70 announced in a letter that was sent to the community early this morning. This announcement fulfills Haldeman's pledge to include input from "all Dartmouth constituencies" in the search process, which he made following the Board's March meeting.
People will be able submit comments through a new page of Dartmouth's web site that will become active on Friday, through the mail or by attending on-campus and off-campus meetings that the Board will hold with students, faculty, staff and members of the Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley, Haldeman said in the letter. The first meetings will occur on April 14 and 15.
The Board will use the input to help craft a "statement on leadership criteria" to aid the search committee in selecting the new president and to help potential candidates decide whether to pursue the position, Haldeman said.
"Input is important because it will guide the trustees as they make their selection, and the input will be valuable to the new president as he makes his decision whether or not he or she is the right person for Dartmouth," Haldeman said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "A candidate doesn't want a mismatch for Dartmouth. They want it to be the right place where their skills and interests align with what the Dartmouth constituencies are looking for."
The final leadership statement will likely not be complete until the summer because the search committee, whose full membership will not be announced until June, will need to endorse it before it can be released.
The Board has not yet decided how long it will accept input, but Haldeman said it would continue for "an extended period of time."
The solicitation of comments from the Dartmouth community is one way in which the Board is attempting to make the search for Dartmouth's 17th president a transparant process, Haldeman said.
"I'm not exactly sure how other institutions conduct their searches, but it seems to me it's hard to imagine a more inclusive process, one that seeks more input from the constituencies than what we're trying to do here," Haldeman said.
Haldeman and Trustee Al Mulley '70, the chair of the search committee, will summarize all input received, without attribution, and distribute it to members of the Board and to the search committee. Whether the received suggestions will be made public, Haldeman said, remains undetermined, as the Board and the search committee must decide jointly whether to disclose the information.
Haldeman said he did not know how much effect the comments will ultimately have on the Board's decision.
"The Board owns the decision on the selection of the next president, and there will be many, many factors that influence that," Haldeman said. "It's pretty hard to quantify precisely how [the input] will be weighed, how it will be evaluated, what percentage it will enter into the decision."
Students, staff and alumni who receive invitations from the Board will be eligible to attend one of the scheduled meetings, according to Haldeman. The meeting for faculty will be attended by members of the Committee on Priorities in Arts and Sciences, two representatives each from Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business and seven representatives from Dartmouth Medical School, according to an e-mail sent from Provost Berry Scherr to faculty members on Thursday. These representatives will ask for input from other members of the faculty through informal group conversations.
