Committee to screen candidates for VPUL

Serious efforts to select a permanent Vice Provost for University Life will begin this week when a faculty-student search committee appointed to screen prospective candidates has its first meeting. Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum, who has served as acting VPUL for the past 18 months, said last week that she is a candidate for the permanent position. Characterizing her term to date as "the most invigorating [experience] of my entire professional life," McCoullum said that as VPUL, she has enjoyed working with diverse constituencies and that she would like to continue contributing to campus life. But last March, when then-interim Provost Martin Lazerson extended McCoullum's tenure as VPUL for the 1994-95 academic year, she told The Daily Pennsylvanian that her term would "definitely end on June 30, 1995." McCoullum was unavailable for comment regarding her decision to seek the VPUL position on a permanent basis. Associate VPUL Larry Moneta refused to comment when asked whether he is seeking the position of permanent VPUL. According to Executive Assistant to the Provost Linda Koons, Mathematics Professor Dennis DeTurck, Religious Studies Professor Ann Matter, Microbiology Professor Helen Davies and Operations and Information Management Professor James Laing will serve on the VPUL Search Committee. Medical student Erick Santos and Engineering doctoral student Charles Roe will also participate in the committee's deliberations, and Koons said she expects to receive the names of undergraduates who will serve on the committee from Nominations and Elections Committee Chairperson Rick Gresh, a College senior, this week. Provost Stanley Chodorow said he decided to search internally for a permanent VPUL because of his desire to have "someone in the job who knows Penn well and who is known." He added that he does not want an outsider to make the changes in the Division of University Life that have been recommended by the Coopers & Lybrand report on administrative restructuring and will be recommended in the forthcoming report of the Provost's Council on Undergraduate Education. "I want change to be natural -- an outgrowth of how we have provided student services and of how Penn as a whole does what it does," he said. Implementation of these recommendations is expected to alter the organization of the Division of University Life and the way it delivers services to students over the next few years. But Chodorow said it is impossible to speculate on precisely how the responsibilities of the VPUL will change. "[PCUE] is setting up a process for the development of some aspects of the existing experience and of some new things," he said. "The University Life division and the job of the VPUL will help shape and be shaped by those new and expanded elements of the experience." Chodorow said the goal of reorganizing the Division of University Life is to better integrate student services into the academic programs available on campus -- thereby improving all programs. A timetable for the search process has not yet been set, and Chodorow said the pace of the search committee's progress depends on how long it takes to review candidates' files and interview them.

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