by Jeremy Hunt
Daily Lobo
The provost search committee will look for someone who is compatible with President David Schmidly.
"The provost is really the president's second in command," said Julie Fulghum, chairwoman of the search committee. "You have to find someone with a balance of outstanding academic experience and that will also be a good match for working with the president."
Schmidly announced the members of the search committee Thursday.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The 17-member committee includes faculty, staff and the deans of the pharmacy college and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Schmidly said the provost's job includes allocating resources for academics and making decisions regarding faculty tenure.
"It governs the most important part of the University," he said. "The job is to keep the heart of the institution - the academic enterprise - functioning well and serving students."
Viola Florez, dean of the college of education, became the interim provost after Reed Dasenbrock was appointed the state's secretary of higher education in May.
The committee wants to name a provost in the spring semester, said Fulghum, chairwoman of the chemical and nuclear engineering department.
She said the University needs a permanent provost as soon as possible, because the new vice president positions for institutional diversity and enrollment management have temporary appointments.
"Since these vice presidents will report to the provost, we want to appoint and announce a provost as early as the spring semester, if possible, so we can promptly move to interviewing vice president candidates,"
she said.
UNM needs a provost who will stick around for a while to stabilize the administration, Fulghum said.
"There's been a lot of turmoil, obviously, in the upper administration," she said. "Everyone has been trying to do the very best they can given the changes in leadership we've had."
To be effective, a provost would have to be at the University for at least five years, Schmidly said.
The provost should have a good relationship with the branch campuses, said Cedric Page, a member of the committee.
"I'm going to be looking for someone who really understands the role of the branch campuses, even though we're all different," said Page, director of UNM-Los Alamos.
Page said the next provost would also need to focus on increasing diversity.
"That would be a very important quality - someone who's comfortable with the language of diversity and worked to get and maintain diversity and can be supportive of those initiatives," he said.
