STAFF EDITORIAL: Snail's pace on dean search

After 15 months, Judith rodin finally appointed a new Law dean. What exactly is taking the administration so long? And in each of those cases, the Rodin administration took more than a year -- and as many as 16 months -- to settle on a candidate. But, we ask, what exactly is taking so long? We've noted before that it is important that Penn take the time to get someone qualified to fill a vacant post. And in several cases, the winning candidate was, at first, reluctant to take the job. Nevertheless, the very lengths of these searches -- which tend to run about six months everywhere else -- are unacceptable. As best illustrated by the School of Arts and Sciences several years ago, schools can stagnate in the absence of permanent leadership. Strategic planning stalls, donors hold back their funds without a dean's vision to support and faculty become increasingly frustrated over time. An interim dean or provost is usually no more than a bandage, able to keep a school together but unable to advance it along any long-term trajectory. It makes little sense that two deans chosen in the past few months -- Wharton's Patrick Harker and Engineering's Eduardo Glandt -- were selected only after many months of service as interim dean. We also fail to see why it took more than a year to pull Fitts from the pack if he was a highly esteemed candidate from the beginning. The lack of transparency in the search process leaves us with more questions than answers. We don't know how many candidates turned down the jobs before the final announcements. And we don't know what role individual personalities -- both on the search committee and in the administration -- play in the selection of new officials. But we do know that the length of these searches are a problem. Presently, Penn has only one major administrative vacancy -- that of the Health System CEO and Medical School dean. With the Law search complete, the administration should take a hard look at what it is doing to unnecessarily prolong these searches -- and what can be done to make them more efficient.