In the month of September, the Presidential Search Advisory Group added the Myers McRae firm to the committee tasked with searching for Winthrop University’s next president.
Following this announcement of the addition of the Myers McRae firm, the PSAG sent out a survey to all Winthrop students, as well as hosted a virtual town hall on Zoom for students to voice their opinions on Sept. 23.
Myers McRae is what is known as an “executive search and consulting firm” and will assist the committee with the process of searching and vetting potential candidates for the Winthrop presidency.
“What the search firm will do is a check of the candidates, and some recruiting also, because they have resources we do not have,” said Presidential Search Advisory Group Co-chair Dr. Gloria Jones in the virtual town hall on Sept. 23.
The survey sent out to all Winthrop students in their student emails was fairly short and basic, only asking three simple questions pertaining to the things they want the next president to do, knowledge of the university that is important to a potential candidate and what made the specific student choose Winthrop and whether they had to make compromises in their decisions to enroll at the university.
The survey was the main talking point in the virtual town hall, with the moderator spending the majority of the time going over the questions already asked in the survey, with students being allowed to ask questions at the end.
The timeline of finding a presidential candidate is still up in the air, but with the addition of the Myers McRae firm, the PSAG is hoping to narrow down the search to a few candidates by early next year.
“The search firm will do some general cutting out of people who do not meet the minimum qualifications; then they will go through and get a list of people so forth and so on, and then share the top candidates’ information with the trustees,” Jones said. “Their goal is to try and have candidates selected by the end of this calendar year, people whom they will try to bring in for interviews in January and February.”
Once these top candidates are decided, the hope of the PSAG is that students will have the opportunity to get to hear the candidates’ presentations and give their input to the PSAG.
“You [the students] will have the opportunity, we hope, to hear the presentations of the individual candidates and offer your input after you have met each one,” Jones said.
Winthrop University students are excited about the opportunity to weigh in their opinions of what the next president of the university should focus on, and a lot agree on wanting a president who engages more in the Winthrop community.
“In the next president, I’m looking for someone who is genuinely interested in student activities and who participates in events,” said Peyton Tolley, senior art education major.
There are a lot of expectations for this next president as to how they should handle the issues that have been brought up over the recent few years, after students criticized the current administration for their poor handling of issues like sexual assault and the recently acknowledged accessibility issues. And a few students spoke up about these concerns during the town hall.
“I felt like it was really important that we all spoke out on accessibility and Title IX as much as we did. It seemed like they were at least a little bit aware of that. And so I just thought it was really important to double down on those efforts, like, we need to get those fixed right now, we are hiring another president, and we need to make sure he knows that,” said Rayvn Speigner, freshman digital information design major.
What Winthrop students are looking for is a president who is not only personable and involved in student activities but is also willing to be someone that fights for the students, not against them. Students who filled out the survey and attended the town hall are hoping this message got through to the PSAG.
“If they’re going to ask us for our input, they’re going to have to be ready for us to voice our concerns,” Speigner said.
