Oh my. Serous nominations only.
@vu72 my preferred candidate for our next president is the man in this video…
Mostly joking because they would never ask him and I doubt he would consider but given how many of our past presidents have been LCMS pastors, and how Pastor Jim fits the profile pretty well, I wish it were a possibility!
I don't know Pastor Jim nearly as well as many of you, but having met him once and developed some sense of the man, VU could do much worse. At least he checks the values and character boxes very prominently, and not just because he's a religious man. He's got a solid core.
I hope that Dr. Jon Steinbrecker(spell) is a viable candidate.
I hope that Dr. Jon Steinbrecker(spell) is a viable candidate.
I don't think he'd want to give up being the MAC commissioner. At least right now probably not.
He is chairing the search process so I think that disqualifies him on that alone.
University senior administration searches can be strange (when compared to executive searches in firms). While I cannot imagine having a candidate also be a member of the search committee, I have seen cases where the search fails and the university ends up hiring someone from the committee (in such a case, the person was usually serving as the interim).
He is chairing the search process so I think that disqualifies him on that alone.
Someone doesn’t remember the Dick Cheney precedent from 25 years ago. 
@valpo64 - disagree on Steinbrecher as president, in fact the lack of urgency in searching for a new president and keeping Padilla in the mix had been frustrating. We need someone that can take over, get engagement and has expertise to resolve issues and get the job done. Also, Valpo might also have to provide a higher salary to hire a credible person.
Yes, all of the reasons that a business moves quickly to hire a CEO SHOULD apply to the urgencies facing today's higher education. Every wasted month slows the needed recovery. The brontosaurus we call higher education needs to pick up its pace. But we appear to have faculty from VU and elsewhere who are pretty astute business thinkers. And they bring helpful warning that the hiring process is different and can backfire by skipping steps.
It seems this problem has been decades in the making. Over many decades of 1950s-80s american prosperity, universities felt insulated from any market realities. Idealistic concepts like "shared governance" and collegial dialog worked because money was flowing like a river and the baby boomer students kept flowing to them from high schools. Then in the 90s the Berlin wall fell and we got a peace dividend. We were feeling no pain and the flower child protesters of the 60s had become our university leaders and senior faculty. Then more recently in 2009, Obama quietly wedged into ObamaCare a complete federal take over of the student loan industry. It now guarantees all loans against the market risks of poor borrower credit. The college said thank you very much. We will send out that loan stated literally as a guaranteed portion of our "financial aid award!" And we'll increase our budgets. Thank you, Uncle Sam! Now we can build those luxury water parks and rock climbing walls.
I'm going to have to agree with the staff members on this one. Having family in education allows me to say that positions such as president, superintendent, ect require a lot more insight. You can't come at this with a business mindset. Sure a business would move quickly to hire a CEO, but a university president is a lot more demanding of a job than a CEO in my opinion. I know it's frustrating having a lame duck, but I think anyone here can say they would enjoy a longer process where candidates are properly screened to ensure their motives and beliefs align with the school, and that they have the tools required to turn the ship around
There is truth in both sides of the argument (related to Valpo) for hiring a new President. As I mentioned previously, the process is much longer for a university of hire a President than a firm to hire a CEO. That said, it took the people at Valpo far too long to develop the job description. The job description was very well done, but it was five months from the time Pres. Padilla announced his departure and releasing that job description. Given that the vast majority of candidates will only transition over the winter break or summer, it will be very unliely for Valpo to meet the winter window (and we're not even considering that failed first searches are not uncommon).
So related to that, Valpo will need an interim President...thus they should appoint one now and move Padilla totally out (rather than wait until the end of the year).
Realist - I don't disagree with the sequence of events you list and your point, but there is more to the story. Some states have dramatically reduced funding to their universities. Over the last 25 years, Wisconsin has reduced its education appropriations per student by 26% and Indiana has reduced its appropriations per student by 35%. Over half of the states in the country had reductions greater than 10%. Those reduction certainly got passed on as increased tuition and fees.
@Rez - I get it, but this process despite your concerns is drastically lagging, and keeping Padilla around to suppress a new direction doesn't help.
@usc4valpo — agreed. The concern is not that Padilla is a lame duck. The worry is how much damage can he do while a search goes on, and how many candidates he might scare away by blowing holes in the ship.
I don't know whether Pastor J Wetzstein would be considered seriously or not, but I too agree he's a person of substance and that counts for a lot!
Not only does he know Valpo and the Lutheran world verrrrry well, but he's got a rigorous intellectual sensibility. He's also doing his PhD at Notre Dame, so he also has some alternate institutional culture experience. Obviously he's not involved in the nitty gritty of ND's operations, but doctoral training is long enough that it really does shape your sense of what a university is or can be. No doubt he's imbibed something of how a university culture can aim/orient upwards, which IMHO would be pretty important in a next leader, since Valpo's long been awash in a lot of reactive and desperate short-term thinking and reproduction of mediocrities. Though in most cases if Valpo did choose someone from within I'd be worried that they'd be too locked into that culture of the downward spiral, on the contrary Pastor Jim is an administrator-intellectual who actually does have feet in a couple of very different institutional cultures. He'd see the need to simultaneously grapple with Valpo's limitations and realities and strive to make it a better rather than worse school.
I'm guessing, though, that the uni would not go or SUCH an unorthodox choice these days though. It seems like most/all universities are going for a more predictable profile of 'higher ed business' credentialing. The cynic in me is expecting another technocrat inclined to race to the bottom. We'll see!
