At a Thursday meeting of the Institutions of Higher Learning's Board of Trustees, the board approved a motion to put together a search advisory constituency.
It means that university stakeholders have more of an input on the next president, working under the board’s direction to help select JSU’s next president.
It’s a measure that hasn’t been used for presidential searches in a while.
“I think you all may realize that this is the first time our board has done this in a long time,” said BOT President Gee Ogletree during the meeting. “It's because we've heard from many people asking us to broaden this process and we're listening.”
The search committee chair and commissioner will put together a list of potential members and submit it for board review at a later meeting.
Those members will likely be faculty, alumni and students said search committee chair and trustee Steven Cunningham.
He added that they haven’t made determinations for their draft list just yet, but that they’d likely be leaders from each of those groups.
With the frequent turnover of JSU presidents, Cunningham, himself a JSU graduate, said they wanted to build trust with the community.
“We just wanted to get to a place where we could instill more sense of transparency and the best way to do that is to get more stakeholders brought into the process,” Cunningham told MPB.
Likewise, they’re doing things a little differently with other parts of the search: the board selected the firm Association of Governing Board of Universities and Colleges Search instead of Academic Search, which they had used previously.
“We're using a brand new search group also, which should let the constituency groups know that we're trying to do something different,” Cunningham said.
The university's last president, Marcus Thompson, was JSU’s third president in five years. His tenure lasted less than two years.
Right now, JSU is led by interim president Dr. Denise Jones, who previously served as the university’s provost and vice president for academic affairs.
JSU student body president Raegan Johnson told MPB that the student government is excited about the search-- and that they're working with students to determine what they want in their next president.
“Generally, just anything that would advance the institution as far as research, academics, and the legacy of our institution,” she told MPB.
The board's next meeting will be on November 20 at Mississippi State University. Members of the public can submit comments on the search online.
