Written by Blake Mathews; Sarah Kyle
As of this week, the hunt for the new dean of the College of Communication is officially underway, though the details of the selection process are still up in the air.
Since Dr. Mike James, the current dean of communication, announced he would be leaving Searcy to lead the HUG program next semester, communication professors have been e-mailing the office of academic affairs applications for his job. Those who are not interested themselves have recommended colleagues for the position.
Exactly how each member of the communication faculty has responded is a confidential matter, Dr. Steven Frye explained. To release a list of candidates risks turning the process into a political campaign.
“The selection process should not be one of popularity or persuasiveness,” Frye said. “It should be one of analysis for where we are as a college and who best can serve to take us where we wish to be in the future.”
None of the professors admitted to being a candidate when asked directly. Dr. James, the dean himself, said even he did not know.
“I think there are a lot of good candidates for it: Becki Weaver, Jack Shock, Jim Miller and there are a lot of other ones,” James said. “I’ve got a feeling that they’ve applied, but I don’t know for certain. I’m trying intentionally to not ask or find out.”
The only one who knows for certain is Dr. Larry Long, vice president of academic affairs. He is directly and, at this stage of the process, solely responsible for picking through faculty applications and narrowing down the list of candidates. Right now, he said, he is just looking at background information as he plans the next step.
“I am soliciting input from the faculty in the College of Communication,” Long said. Whichever names Long chooses will be passed up to President David Burks, who makes the official decision to hire James’s replacement. But the process is not that simple, Long said, or that defined.
“I’ll make a recommendation to Dr. Burks about whether we interview one or two or six, and at that point it would be a direct interview approach,” he said. “If he chooses to have a committee filter it past me, that would not be unusual. It wouldn’t be unusual also for him to say, ‘I think we have enough information. We should just interview these two, this one, these three.’ Something like that.”
James is leaving for Greece in a few months, but Long said the administration is not rushing to find a replacement. No dates or deadlines are set, though Long said he would like the new dean to have time to work with James before he leaves in order to “effect some sense of handing off the baton.”
Other universities might replace retiring deans with people hired from outside the institution; people who attended special colleges in order to further their careers as deans. But Long said Harding is more concerned with following its mission and will always look internally before hiring someone from “dean camp.”
“They weren’t in training to be the dean of the College of Communication at Harding University. They wanted a position. The driving force was ambition,” Long said about the people he met during his time at a dean’s college. “That is not the person we would be looking for here.”
As far as what will happen to the future students of the communication professor who becomes the new dean, Long said that all students will be accomodated. He used the illustration of other professors “sliding” in to fill the gaps when a faculty member leaves or drops some hours. Who will have to slide and where, however, is still unknown.
