Presidential Search to Begin

Photo courtesy of Hannah Foley ’23

On Mar. 24 at 11 a.m., current president Katherine Bergeron sent an email to the campus community to announce her resignation as president of Connecticut College to take effect at the end of the semester. This was in response to weeks of protests from the faculty, staff, and student body. Now, the exciting and daunting task of finding a new president must begin. The last presidential search occurred in 2013 with the 2013 Presidential Search Committee. Professors Stanton Ching and Ron Flores as well as alumni Timothy Kast ’14 agreed to speak about their time on the committee to hopefully shed light on what the College may expect shortly.

The 2013 Presidential Search Committee was composed of nine members of the Board of Trustees, four faculty members, two current students, and one staff member: two faculty members were chosen by the Faculty Steering and Conference Committee (FSCC), two faculty members were elected by the faculty body, and the two student representatives were chosen by the SGA President. We were not able to find out a lot about the staff representative, but we can confirm that the 2013 member, Bill O’Neil, worked in the Office of Advancement at the time. 

After the committee formed, they selected an executive search firm that would bring in and help sort through candidates. During the 2013 search, a team from Spencer Stuart was hired and guided the committee throughout the process. The search firm was tasked with talking to the campus community to assess desires for the next president. “The goal of the bigger search committee work was to find out what our strengths and weaknesses of the colleges were, what the opportunities looked like, [and] what the challenges were,” said Ching. He went on to mention the numerous groups that the search firm met with while on campus, including SGA, department chairs, and the retiring president. Once they gathered campus input, the search firm put together mock profiles for the committee to review. These helped the firm develop a sense of the committee’s natural inclinations, which later helped them determine which applicants would appear more attractive to the committee.

After getting committee feedback from the mock profiles, the search firm wrote up a list of desired characteristics for the next president. Among the 2013 preferences was someone who could raise Conn’s reputation: “There was a common understanding among the committee that what Conn offered as an institution didn’t necessarily match its reputation—that we needed to increase our standing amongst peers given the high quality and distinctiveness of a Conn education—so the search really centered around the goal of finding someone to move Conn forward and correct that disconnect,” said Kast. 

Candidates were gathered from all over. There was one internal applicant in 2013 from the Conn community and hundreds of others that the search firm sifted through before presenting them to the committee. Several rounds of finding applicants and conducting interviews occurred next, along with lots of internal deliberations within the committee on who should move on to the next round. In 2013, Bergeron was attractive to the committee as a NESCAC grad with a love for liberal arts and proficient fundraising history, according to Kast. These factors are also listed by Board of Trustee member Pamella Zilly in the 2013 Fall Welcome Event for Katherine Bergeron (starting approx. at the 5:00 mark). Once candidates made it to the final interview stage, their references were checked, and opinions were gathered from others not included on their reference lists. 

When asked if they felt their voices were heard, Ching, Flores, and Kast all agreed they felt their membership was valued and that their thoughts and concerns were taken into consideration by the whole committee. “I think it was a very healthy search committee in the sense that we worked well together,” said Flores. “I was very proud to have served on that committee.”

With less than a month from the end of the semester, the College is once again looking to undergo this search process. We encourage students to keep watch for open forums and campus-wide surveys that will look for your opinions on qualities for the next president, since these have been tools used in past presidential searches. It is most likely that the College will appoint an interim president who will hold the office while a formal search committee is assembled. It is never too early to start thinking about what you want to see in our next president, and it is important to never forget the point of a college president is to serve the needs and desires of the student body.