This is big news. Big, slow-moving news. The University is beginning its search for a new president.\nThe main responsibility falls to the Special Committee on the Nomination of a President, which Rector John Wynne appointed and will chair - though I suspect that much of the work will be done by the search firm R. William Funk and Associates.\nThat's no slap at the committee of the Board of Visitors or anybody else. It's just that in the searches for presidents and chancellors I've seen, that's how it usually works. From time to time, at some universities, a board member will do some recruiting of his or her own and then talk other board members into backing that candidate. But that kind of cowboying generally only works at smaller institutions whose board members are easily cowed or awed. The University is likely to take the advice of the professionals it's chosen to advise it. To do otherwise would be spendthrift and foolish.\nBut the committee has committed to seeking and considering advice from other quarters, too. One of those quarters is yours. Take advantage of that.\nI have not attended any of the forums held to gather advice and information from people who aren't on the committee, but the reports I've read of them make them sound something like special interest group pleadings. Faculty members talked about what the next president should do to, for and with faculty. Staff talked about staff. Students talked about students.\nThere's certainly nothing wrong with that. But someone needs to think about the University as a whole. The main group charged with doing that is the committee itself, of course. They're mostly alumni. Nine members of board of visitors, six faculty members, two former rectors and two students. But they've given you a chance to do some of that, too. The invitation for comment Wynne sent out asked for people to address three things: the opportunities and challenges the University will confront in the coming decade, the qualifications and leadership characteristics the next president should exemplify, and the specific considerations the committee should take into account when evaluating a candidate.\nI've seen much more of the third category than the first two.\nThe Cavalier Daily's editorial page has declared, "Our eighth president should be a visionary who is up to the challenge of providing dynamic leadership through both fruitful and more barren times."\nTrue enough. But I encourage you to think even bigger than that.\nConcentrate on those first two categories. Funding will be a challenge, and The Cavalier Daily has addressed that. What else do you see off in the future? And what are the qualifications and leadership characteristics the next president will need?\nMaybe it hasn't always been so, but college presidents are the fundraisers-in-chief of their institutions. In some places, the president has little or no academic background and so appoints someone else to deal with all that while the president goes off to make money for the university and a name for the president. Some presidents embrace the messy model of campus governance that empowers faculty and staff and students. Others are micro managers who have to have their fingers in every nook and cranny. Some recognize there are things that only a president can do for a university and those are the things a president should be about. Many people advocate the application of a business model to academia and say that we need business people leading colleges and universities. Others adhere to Mr. Jefferson's idea that education should produce not just good workers or good business people, but good citizens. Or, as R. William Funk and Associates put it an ad for the University's next president, "the University sustains the ideal of developing, through education, women and men who are well-prepared to help shape the future of the nation."\nAnd you have a chance to help shape the future of the University.\nYour participation or lack of it is unlikely, on its own, to determine the University's next president. Of course, your vote, on its own, is unlikely to determine the president of the United States, or the governor of Virginia - but that doesn't absolve you from the moral obligation to participate in the process.\nThe governor of Virginia can serve only four years in a row. The president of the United States, eight. John T. Casteen will have been president of the University for 20 years when he leaves office next year. If Casteen's successor lasts that long, some of you will likely have children applying to the University under his leadership.\nFor most of the next year, this should be the biggest, most closely-followed news The Cavalier Daily covers. And you have a chance to not just follow the news, but to help make it.\nTim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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