Pres. to plan provost hunt

President Sheldon Hackney and members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee will meet Wednesday to discuss forming a search committee to find a replacement for Provost Michael Aiken, who announced last week he is leaving the University. Linda Hyatt, acting executive director of the president's office, said yesterday that Hackney hopes a new provost will be named by July 1 -- the day Aiken will assume his new position as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If this happens, she said, there will be no need for an interim provost. Hyatt said the July 1 deadline is "ambitious, but realistic." She said "it would be a fair assumption" that members of the search committee will consider candidates who are both affiliated and unaffiliated with the University. Over the past century, the University has gone through 14 provosts and 2 acting provosts -- and only one, Thomas Ehrlich, was recruited from outside the University. Ehrlich, who served as provost from 1981 until 1986, was former dean of the Stanford University Law School and a Brookings Institute fellow at the time of his University appointment. Aiken, Ehrlich's immediate successor, was dean of the School of Arts and Sciences when he was named provost in 1987. According to some administrators,if the committee considers provost candidates from outside the University, the procedure may take longer than the scheduled four months. "The minute you broaden the search to the outside it becomes more difficult," said Linda Koons, executive assistant to the provost. If no one is named as Aiken's replacement before July and the search for an executive vice president -- ongoing since September -- continues until then too, the University could be functioning with only one of its top three administrators. But Hyatt, who is coordinating the search, said yesterday that she expects an executive vice president to be named within the next month. She said the field of candidates is "very narrow" and only about six candidates are still being considered. But Hyatt said that the president might have narrowed the number of possibilities still further.

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