The old college try

Try again.

That's what Florida Gulf Coast University's presidential search committee must do. It looked at 100 candidates but could settle on only two names to send to the board of trustees for consideration. The rule, via the state, is it needs at least three.

Search panel members will try again Jan. 31. They'll look for a third and a hoped-for fourth name from among new applicants submitted by search firm Witt/Kieffer of Oak Brook, Ill., search committee chairman Ken Smith says. The names will go to the university's board of trustees for a final pick, subject to Florida Board of Governors confirmation.

The search has recently taken on a sense of urgency: the 15,000-student university in Fort Myers must get a deal done by summer, when the current president, Wilson Bradshaw, retires.

Ken Harmon, a provost and vice president for academic affairs at Kennesaw State University in metro Atlanta, is one of the two top candidates. The other is Daniel Heimmermann, a provost and vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

One of the holdups might not be in candidates, but in structure of the position. That's because FGCU is offering its next leader a one-year renewable contract with large annual bonuses for meeting benchmarks and a bonus of two years' pay for hitting goals set for the fifth year. It's a show-us proposition that goes against the traditional way a college recruits and retains a president.

Smith believes the approach will help guarantee FGCU gets a strategic-minded, long-term thinker. “I feel very comfortable,” he says, though he concedes, “we have caught some grief,” in the academic community for the atypical offer.