This fall, Ithaca College will begin its search for a new president – the most important decision it has faced in at least 10 years.

The college’s board of trustees intends to form a 13-member search committee, including seven trustees, three faculty members, one senior-level administrator, one staff member and one student representative.

C. William Schwab, chair of the board of trustees, said the board would accept six nominations from the Faculty Council and two nominations from both the Staff Council and the Student Government Association with the intention of selecting final committee members from these pools.  

An identical process was used in the college’s last presidential search, which began in January 1996 after former President James J. Whalen announced he planned to retire after the 1996-97 year. The search yielded President Peggy R. Williams, who began her tenure July 1997.

What Schwab called “a very successful search process,” however, was not free of complications.  

At the beginning of the last search, the Faculty Council drafted a proposal to the board requesting six representatives on the search committee. When the board announced the composition of the committee — identical to last week’s proposed membership — faculty expressed disappointment with a lack of representation for the diversity of groups on campus.

In the weeks that followed, faculty, staff and students met to reevaluate their roles and submitted a joint request to the board asking them to reconsider their decision.

In March 1996, then-chair Herman E. Muller Jr. announced the board would suspend the search until he met with the leaders of each of the dissatisfied constituencies. After the meeting, he announced the search would resume with its original composition.

In September 1996, the Faculty Council forwarded a final list of three candidates instead of the six requested by the board, so the choices better reflected the council’s voice instead of the qualifications sought by the trustees.

The board responded by eliminating one faculty member from the committee. They gave faculty an opportunity to reinstate a third candidate upon the submission of six nominations, but the faculty voted to stand by their first decision and continued the search with only two representatives.

On the advent of the upcoming search, the campus community should question why a process that experienced such controversy is responsible for choosing the college’s highest administrator, and why the criteria in a search for a candidate who will best serve every constituency on campus is defined, in majority, not by these constituents but by a governing board.

Staff and students, but especially faculty, should take advantage of this search to resolve a deeper issue: defining the role they play in shaping college policy. The faculty are at the core of the college’s character and influence the campus culture more than they are often credited for.

Ten years ago, the faculty council developed a case strong enough to delay the search by months. What they now face is a second chance to take a leading role in steering the institution.

Criticizing policy and rising to change it are two distinctly different concepts. The faculty should fight not only for more weight on the search committee, but also for the power to choose their own representatives.

The stability of the college’s culture and the faculty’s role in administrative decisions both hinge on their actions in the coming weeks. The ultimate goal of the search should be more than finding an ideal candidate to fill this position. It should create a precedent of listening to voices that best reflect the college’s identity.