The search committee has been searching for a chancellor candidate since last August. The new position will replace many of the responsibilities currently held by the provost and, the trustees hope, will allow the president to step back from Bloomington and focus on the university as a whole.
(Courtesy of Purdue University)
Purdue Vice President for Policy Planning David Reingold met Indiana University faculty and staff Thursday as one of two candidates for Bloomington’s new chancellor.
Reingold is also a sociology professor and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University.
In its job posting, IU said it was looking for candidates who are familiar with Bloomington. Reingold taught at IU Bloomington from 1997 to 2008 and led IU’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs between 2008 and 2015.
At Purdue, he helped lead a program known as Cornerstone that was intended to revive liberal arts as part of the undergraduate education.
A professor in attendance asked how he would respond to humanities faculty who might consider the program a recognition that humanists and artists play more of a service role in higher education, rather than research.
“I would push back a little bit on that,” Reingold said. “They are the on ramp for students to follow those faculty into subsequent courses.”
One faculty member asked for his thoughts on a law passed last year that allows professors to have tenure revoked for not teaching multiple viewpoints in class.
“I think the spirit of SB 202 – maybe it’s charitable to say – but I think it was designed to try and make sure public institutions neither become an echo chamber or a surveillance state,” he said. “I think some people interpreted it as potentially moving in a different direction on the surveillance state side, although I have not seen any evidence of it.”
Other aspects of the law, such as defining tenure in Indiana state law and protecting professors from retaliation for speaking out against their schools he called “quite remarkable.”
The search committee has been searching for a chancellor candidate since last August. The new position will replace many of the responsibilities currently held by the provost and, the trustees hope, will allow the president to step back from Bloomington and focus on the university as a whole.
IU hired the firm Isaacson, Miller to help guide the search.
Faculty told its members in September that they were worried IU Bloomington was at risk of losing its unique strengths and wanted a candidate who was unafraid to push back on state interference. Isaacson, Miller incorporated some of that feedback into its job description.
Ultimately, though, it will be the president’s decision on who to hire.
The next candidate town hall will be March 6, and the identity of that candidate will likely be revealed the day before.
