Illinois, Connecticut candidates to interview for UT job
KNOXVILLE (AP) — With five candidates interviewed and five more to go, the search for the next president of the University of Tennessee is far from over.
“It is still a horse race,” said Jim Murphy, chairman of an 18-member search advisory council of trustees, faculty, staff, students and alumni.
The first of three rounds of public interviews began Tuesday with the goal of narrowing a 10-candidate field to four to six candidates on Thursday.
Five interviewed Tuesday. Three more interview Wednesday: Northern Illinois University President John Peters, a former provost at Tennessee’s main campus in Knoxville; UT Law Dean Tom Galligan, and John Peterson, provost at the University of Connecticut.
Two remaining candidates appear before the council Thursday.
Another round of interviews next week by another panel will yield up to three finalists. The full Board of Trustees will quiz them April 21 before selecting the 23rd president in the 210-year history of the five-campus, 42,000-student system.
“The way the whole thing operates, there is a basic assumption here that you really do want this job,” Kermit Hall, president of Utah State University, said after his two-hour session Tuesday.
Hall, 59, compared the unusually open search process to getting a nuclear security clearance some years ago. “I am being put through the whole thing again,” he said. “Now that is OK. I have no problem with this at all.”
Background checks are being done, resumes verified and search committee members are visiting the candidates’ home turfs in an effort to avoid the scandals that ended two recent Tennessee presidencies — John Shumaker’s in August and J. Wade Gilley’s in 2001.
“I feel like a well-done, stuffed pig,” Jack Burns, 51, vice president for academic affairs and research for the University of Colorado system, said after his interview. “Points here and there.”
But Burns said he was “eager for the inquiries. As I told the search advisory committee, I am an open book.”
“I welcome it. We need a lot more open discussion in higher education today,” said candidate Brady Deaton, provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
Deaton, 61, a former agricultural economics professor at Tennessee, said the search offers “a wonderful opportunity to take a look at what this university can do. I think there is unlimited potential here.”
Two other candidates interviewed Tuesday brought greater familiarity to the job: UT-Chattanooga Chancellor Bill Stacy and Knoxville hospital executive Jerry Askew, a former development official at UT-Knoxville.
“I don’t know how to comment on that,” Stacy said when asked if he is a front-runner. “I will tell you I love being part of the University of Tennessee and that I have worked with Tennesseans and they produce.”
Though not asked about his age, the 65-year-old Stacy said he is in excellent health and is prepared to devote the next several years to the presidency.
Askew, 50, called the university “a diamond in the rough” that for too long has had an inferiority complex about its peer institutions.
“I am frustrated that we haven’t reached our full potential. We don’t have to keep it a secret forever,” he said.
In an unusual turn, Askew added: “If I am not the best candidate I don’t want you to pick me. I care that deeply (about the university).”
The search council asked each candidate the same 16 questions covering a breadth of basic issues — from fund-raising to defining a “vision” for the university to whether anything in their past “would cause embarrassment to you, your current employer or the university.”
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To read biographical summaries of each of the candidates, visit http://pr.tennessee.edu/presidentialsearch