By AIDAN QUIGLEY
VtDigger
BURLINGTON — The University of Vermont has named Suresh Garimella, an executive vice president at Purdue University in Indiana, as the sole finalist in its presidential search.
Garimella is the executive vice president for research and partnerships at Purdue, and is also a professor of mechanical engineering. He serves on the National Science Board, which advises President Donald Trump and Congress on science policy.
Garimella will be visiting campus from Feb. 13-15, after which the university’s board of trustees will vote on whether to authorize his appointment.
The announcement of Garimella as the only finalist coming to campus has some faculty concerned about their lack of input in the decision-making process. In previous presidential searches, multiple finalists have come to campus, and the search committee had said it would be doing the same this cycle.
The university’s current president, Tom Sullivan, announced in August that he would be stepping aside as president and joining the faculty after the current academic year. Sullivan has been the university’s president since 2012.
During his tenure, the university saw a record number of applications, an increase in graduation rates and a successful $500 million capital campaign. But some students called for his resignation last year, saying he had not adequately responded to racist incidents on campus.
Garimella served as the chief global affairs officer and the associate vice president for engagement before stepping into his current role. He also served as a science adviser in the U.S. State Department’s international energy office and as a senior fellow in the State Department’s Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas.
David Daigle, the chair of the university’s board of trustees, said Monday that Garimella best embodied the qualities the university was looking for.
“What we saw in Dr. Garimella is someone who is passionate about student success, he is a passionate educator, he is a very distinguished scholar … and he is an unbelievable relationship builder,” Daigle said.
Daigle said that Garimella was able to establish relationships both within the campus community at Purdue and with outside groups, like foundations and government entities. He said that Garimella’s work aided Purdue students by bringing additional grants, philanthropic gifts and research opportunities to campus.
Garimella earned his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, an M.S. from Ohio State University and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
In his cover letter for the position, Garimella touted his experience as both a senior administrator and as an active researcher and educator. He wrote that he was proud of leading efforts to build strategic partnerships with corporations, foundations and state and federal governments in the United States and overseas.
“My breadth of experience as an active faculty researcher and educator — in senior university administration, in government service, and through my service on non-profit and private sector boards — positions me well to take on this critical leadership role,” he wrote.
Purdue has seen four straight years of record growth in total sponsored funding, he wrote, and has been able to acquire resources for investment in education and research while minimizing costs and freezing tuition.
Garimella wrote that nurturing diversity and inclusion would be a priority.
“Targeting efforts at enriching hiring pools, training search committees to raise awareness, and supporting dual-career hiring and family-friendly policies are all examples of important tactics,” he wrote.
He also wrote that he would work with the trustees, Legislature and university leadership to understand the university’s finances and incentive-based budgeting model.
“Accountability, and tracking progress toward metrics, is ingrained in all that we do,” he wrote. “Indeed, my own compensation carries a significant fraction that is performance-based and at-risk.”
Closed process?
During the inaugural meeting of the presidential search committee, the committee said it was planning to bring finalists to campus to engage with the campus community.
Daigle said multiple candidates said they were not willing to be part of a competitive public process in its final stages. While the university could have insisted on moving forward with the public process, Daigle said it would have hurt the quality of the candidates.
“Had we done that, we would have lost several of our most credible finalist candidates, and given the strength of the people we had developed, we determined it would be better to keep these people in the pool,” he said.
Sarah Alexander, the president of United Academics, the university’s faculty union, said faculty are surprised by the announcement. She said members were told they would get a list of finalists and be able to engage with them on campus.
“From our perspective, there is a problematic lack of transparency in the search process,” she said. “Faculty should be involved in these kinds of decisions as part of the university’s commitment to shared governance.”
Alexander said she has heard from many other faculty members voicing similar concerns about the transparency of the process.
Daigle said the 24-person search committee — comprised of trustees, faculty, staff and students — was the largest in university history.
“We are highly confident that we have received sufficient community engagement to make the determination to go with a sole finalist,” he said.
Other public universities, including Texas A&M, the University of Minnesota, the University of Connecticut and the University of Georgia, have followed the “sole finalist” model in recent searches, Daigle said.
The university worked with executive search firm Witt/Kieffer in the search.
UVM agreed to pay the firm an estimated $125,000, according to the contract between the university and the firm that VTDigger acquired through a public records request.
Garimella was not one of the candidates who was uncomfortable with a competitive public finalist process, Daigle said.
Garimella was a finalist in an open presidential search at the University of Central Florida in spring 2018. He appeared at an open forum at the university of one of four finalists but was not selected for the position. UCF decided to hire its provost, Dale Whittaker, instead.
Ethan Foley, a UVM junior and the president of the Student Government Association, said that Garimella sounds like a qualified candidate.
He said that while he and the other members of the student government’s executive committee were disappointed that they were not given the chance to meet other candidates, he understood that the sole finalist model was an unfortunate reality of presidential searches in higher education.
“The search committee seems to feel this is the best decision, and if this is the decision that had to be made to ensure UVM got the best candidate for president, so be it,” Foley said.
Frank LoMonte, the director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida and an expert on higher education, said that conducting a presidential search behind closed doors is antithetical to the mission of higher education.
“If you ask every university in America, they’ll say their goal is to graduate students who are engaged in the community and civic life, and then they make the biggest decision in university history behind closed doors, without their input,” he said.
LoMonte said that the traditional practice has been to bring multiple finalists to campus so the wider campus community can make sure that the candidate is a good personality and culture fit with the university.
“Whether or not they lucked into a good person through a bad process, it’s not an optimally thorough or respectful way,” he said. “It’s just disrespectful to the people on the campus to say, we are going to stick you with this person, whether you like them or not.”