Thomas Rochon, the final candidate for the Ithaca College presidency, visited campus this week. Rochen, the executive vice president and chief academic officer of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., held sessions for the campus community yesterday and Tuesday.

The search for a new president began in July when President Peggy R. Williams announced her plans to retire at the end of the school year. A new president will be chosen by the college’s Board of Trustees, chaired by C. William Schwab ’68. Schwab said the search committee would examine all the candidates and present its findings to the board during the first week of April.

In a presentation before the campus community yesterday, Rochon said there are many questions people have about higher education issues, including the escalating cost, diversity and political bias.

Rochon said behind all the questions people have about higher education lies a lack of understanding of what higher education is, what it does and what difference it makes. He said it has lost its voice.

“Higher education [is not] speaking clearly and coherently on what it is we’re all about [and] what it is we’re trying to accomplish,” he said.

Rochon, who earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, also spoke about the importance of experiences outside the traditional academic curriculum. He said it’s important to give students the opportunity to come together.

“The specifics don’t really matter,” Rochon said. “It’s a question of sometimes taking a crisis or a problem and creating around it an opportunity for people to reflect together and ask what they stand for.”

Student Government Association president and senior Aaron Bloom said he felt Rochon was very in tune with the important issues of higher education.

“When he was addressing issues that are affecting higher education as a whole, he was also infusing that with social sustainability, environmental sustainability [and] diversity issues,” he said.

Rochon’s five-year tenure at St. Paul, an 11,000-student Catholic university, has not been without controversy. In 2006, the University came under fire from students and faculty for a policy that restricted same sex and unmarried couples from staying in the same room while traveling on school-sponsored trips.

Rochon said the controversy must be looked at within the context of St. Thomas being a Catholic university. He said because Ithaca is a secular school, the issue would never arise.

“All universities are about the open discussion, dialogue, search for truth and understanding,” Rochon said, “But in a Catholic university ... some matters are considered to be settled by virtue of Catholic teachings.”

Last year, the university had an opportunity to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak on campus. After some members of the community said Tutu was anti-Semitic, St. Thomas president Father Dennis Dease decided to not invite him.

As a result of the administration’s decision, Cris Toffolo, a professor and, at the time, chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program, sent Tutu a letter informing him of the administration’s decision. She also indicated her disagreement with the decision.

Rochon said Toffolo was subsequently removed from her position as chair of the program. He said it was not for disagreeing with Dease.

“It was for behaviors I regarded as unprofessional and unethical,” Rochon said. He said Toffolo could have filed a grievance but would not comment further because of legal obligations.

Carl Mickman, president of the St. Thomas undergraduate student government, said that when asked about the incident, Rochon and Dease were not receptive to concerns.

“Complete silence,” he said. “They were really just not willing to discuss a lot of these things with students.”

Dease apologized to Tutu and officially invited him. Tutu had already committed to another speaking engagement and said he wouldn’t visit unless Toffolo was reinstated.

Agapitos Papagapitos, chair of the St. Thomas economics department and chair-elect of the faculty senate, said his first two years dealing with Rochon were rocky, but since then, the relationship between Rochon and the faculty has improved.

“He has become a better listener,” Papagapitos said.  “I think he has understood better what the culture of the university is. He has become a person who leads with more consensus than he was at the beginning.”

He said the university has put Rochon in a tough position, which has affected his relationship with campus.

“He has had to break the bad news to everybody ... and that’s not a good spot to be in,” he said.

Rochon said it would be “enormously freeing” to work at a secular institution.

“At St. Thomas sometimes these controversies have been a distraction,” he said. “… There are far more important issues to talk about.”