Former and current college presidents, administrators, professors and possibly a member of the current Bush administration could make it onto the Board of Trustees' search committee's list for a successor to College President James Wright, who will step down in June 2009. The committee will be announced in early June.
If history is any guide, Wright's successor will have a prior relationship with the College. Only three of Dartmouth's 16 presidents were appointed without a Dartmouth affiliation. Before his appointment as president, Wright was a history professor and dean of the faculty at the College.
Dartmouth's peer institutions in the Ivy League also tend to appoint presidents with prior affiliations to the schools. Currently, the presidents at Yale University, Princeton University and Columbia University have past connections to their respective institutions as alumni, former members of the faculty or former university employees.
A number of former Dartmouth faculty members and administrators who currently hold prominent positions at other institutions will likely be considered by the search committee. Lee Pelton, dean of the College from 1991 until 1998, is now president of Willamette University. Tufts University Provost Jamshed Bharucha was Dartmouth's dean of the faculty from 2001 until 2002 and served on the Dartmouth faculty for almost 20 years. Carleton College President Robert Oden and Bryn Mawr College President Nancy Vickers have also taught at the College in the past.
Robert Witt Tu'64 is currently president of the University of Alabama and Marye Anne Fox Adv'74 is the chancellor of the University of California, San Diego.
Some alumni, usually those critical of Wright, have suggested that the current administration is grooming current Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt for the presidency. Wright said in an interview with The Dartmouth that he had "no preferred candidate."
He added that recent alumni critiques of Folt have been politically motivated and unfair, noting that Folt is "not angling to be in my position."
"Dean Folt is an exceptional dean of faculty, scientist and teacher, and it's just too bad that the politics of something like this takes this nasty turn toward her," Wright said. "She deserves better."
Folt could not be reached for comment by press time.
Wright noted that having a connection to Dartmouth could be an advantage to a candidate, but said it would not likely be a defining issue in the search.
"Dartmouth has many remarkable, unique qualities to the culture here, and I think it helps to know about them," Wright said. "On the other hand, a good outside, fresh look is never a bad thing either."
The suggestion that Folt is a possible candidate is significant as Ivy League institutions have recently shown a tendency to appoint female presidents. Former University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin, who served from 1994 to 2004, was the first female head of an Ivy League university. Currently, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton and Penn have female presidents. Dartmouth has not yet had a female president.
Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Syracuse University since 2004, will likely be on the search committee's list. Cantor was named as a possible replacement to Lawrence Summers, who resigned as Harvard's president in 2006. She was also named as a potential successor to Rodin. The presidential search at Penn was supported by the executive search firm Isaacson, Miller -- the same firm that Dartmouth hired to aid the search for Wright's successor.
The search committee will likely consider several candidates from other Ivy League institutions' recent presidential searches, including Dartmouth's last search. Williams College President Morton Schapiro was a finalist to succeed former College President James Freedman in 1998, according to the prominent Williams "Eph" blog, and will potentially be considered in the current search.
In addition to Cantor, the finalists in Harvard's recent search to replace Summers that the College may consider include Alison Richard, vice chancellor at the University of Cambridge, and Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy, both of whom publicly denied interest in the Harvard position.
Many members of the Dartmouth community have indicated that they would prefer that the next president have experience in academia, College trustee and head of the search committee Al Mulley '70 said in an interview.
"If it were up to me, I would find it hard to imagine that the outcome of a national or international search would not be someone that would be an easy case for tenure at Dartmouth," Andrew Samwick, director of the Rockefeller Center and Dartmouth economics professor, said in an interview.
The last president at the College without a Ph.D. was David McLaughlin '54 Tu'55, who served from 1981 to 1987. McLaughlin suffered from strained relations with the College's faculty, which drafted a letter to the Board of Trustees asking for "responsible leadership for Dartmouth" in February 1986 and pressed for McLaughlin's successor to have an academic background.
The faculty has "tremendous credibility with the Board of Trustees and with alumni," Wright said. Mulley noted that Dartmouth's previous two presidential search committees have included members of the faculty. He would not comment on the composition or size of this committee, adding that those decisions will be made in June.
On the other hand, a number of Dartmouth community members have also recommended that the College consider a successor who is not from the academic world, Mulley said.
"There were e-mails saying that we should think outside of the box, that we should look at the corporate world," he said.
Former Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer and current Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson '68, among others, has been mentioned as a possible candidate.
Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University will be conducting presidential searches at the same time as Dartmouth, Mulley said. It is not uncommon for preeminent institutions to undergo concurrent searches, he added.
Staff reporter Allyson Bennett contributed to this article.
