Teachers College searching for new dean

<p>James Stroud, one of the candidates for the Teachers College dean, is interviewed In the&nbsp;Letterman building on March 16. The search committee will either choose Stroud or Satasha Green to replace Dean John Jacobson by July 1. <em>Sara Barker // DN&nbsp;</em></p>

James Stroud, one of the candidates for the Teachers College dean, is interviewed In the Letterman building on March 16. The search committee will either choose Stroud or Satasha Green to replace Dean John Jacobson by July 1. Sara Barker // DN 

The College of Sciences and Humanities and the Honors College are also searching for deans.

The next open forum for the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities position will be March 24 at 11:00 a.m. in Whitinger Building 144.

The Honors College has two upcoming forums: the first on March 21 at 3 p.m. and the second on March 23 at 1 p.m. Both will take place in the Ball Honors House.

The view from the top of the Teachers College is famous, but the vision from its dean’s office is about to change.

A search committee is reviewing two candidates, Satasha Green and James Stroud, to replace Dean John Jacobson by July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year.

Right now, Stroud is the associate dean of the Teachers College, has sat on various committees and was a co-adviser for living-learning communities.

Green has not previously worked at Ball State. However, she has been dean of college and education at Chicago State University, associate dean of the College of Education at the University of Alaska Anchorage and dean of the School of Education at New York Institute of Technology in addition to promoting diversity across all universities, according to The Business Journal.

Jacobson said whoever becomes the new dean will have a "tremendous responsibility to the university" because he or she will oversee all education programs plus Burris, the Indiana Academy and the office of charter schools.

“You are not just the dean of Teachers College,” Jacobson said.

The next Teachers College dean needs to live up to demands of the job, Jacobson said. The next-in-line should be energetic, be willing to work with people and be a lifelong scholar.

To find the most qualified person for the job, a search committee underwent the “exhaustive” process of finding and narrowing down candidates, committee chair David Ferguson said.

“It’s always difficult,” Ferguson said. "I can tell you that I have a great deal of respect for this committee because they took their role extremely seriously. We put in hours and hours of work.”

The committee spends those hours following an action plan with the goal of narrowing down a pool of applicants from across the nation to two, three or four candidates, all qualified for the job.

Ferguson said a couple dozen people applied to be dean, and after one round of interviews to determine who met minimum requirements, the committee narrowed the candidates down to about half a dozen.

Now the committee is preparing a shortlist of the two candidates to send to the provost and the president, who then make a final decision and offer the job to the person they choose.

During the selection process, the search committee has actively tried to listen to what faculty and students want to see in their next dean through hosting town halls held last fall and open forum-style interviews held this week for the two candidates.

“I do think that you heard a fair amount of what you would normally hear in any high-level leadership search, which is we value open communication, we value collaboration,” Ferguson said. “Basically, the people want their voice to be heard and that’s completely understandable.”

Current students were welcome to attend the forums and complete forms to be sent to the provost describing their opinions of the candidates.

Although she did not attend the forums, Katharine Otolski, a senior special education major, knows what she wants to see in her next dean.

“Someone who is very smart, very well-spoken, will find different ways of communicating with the students,” Otolski said. “Someone who is willing to take new steps and new ideas.”

Unlike when a new university president takes office, an incoming dean does not have a transition team but instead has an orientation period, existing faculty and other university deans to help guide him or her.

Now that the open forums have ended, the search committee will discuss next week if Stroud and Green are the candidates to forward to the president and provost.

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