Selecting a New College President

By Harold "Hal" Hassin, MD

The new College president must be a selfless, confirmed collaborator who takes naturally to developing partnerships with leaders inside and outside the campus.

Clearly the faculty is a key constituency the new president must court. In my talks with them I feel that their morale is low and their backs are up because they perceive they have been cut out of the decision-making process. The faculty are concerned that they have been sidelined while decisions were made to spend precious dollars on projects that have either proved to be failures or drained money from more pressing priorities. The new president must find a way to engage the faculty early in program planning and budget deliberations. A president's forum for routinely vetting new projects with faculty will go a long way to incorporating faculty perspective into administration's plans for the future.

College of Marin students are a much more diverse population than exists on the standard four-year college campus. College of Marin students include those: · Transferring to four year colleges · Learning English as a Second Language · Acquiring basic skills necessary to enter the marketplace · Enhancing the vitality of their lives through community education/life long learning · And those striving to stay competitive in today's global economy by enhancing existing vocational skills or learning new skills by entering workforce development programs. The requirements of these distinct student populations are very different from one another and they all must be heard.

The College has been the focus of cultural life in the past. The president must find a way to inject that vitality back into the campus. Conversations with community political, cultural and social leaders will help define a new role for the College in community life.

The new president must have an entrepreneurial bent. It will be important to spot and respond to trends early. If we are losing young transfer students to other colleges but gaining students that yearn for life long learning experiences, we shouldn't attempt to hold back the tide. Let's recognize the opportunities for success by defining and creating a unique and vibrant community education program that meet and exceed the best programs in the state.

Lastly, and certainly not least, the new president must collaborate with the Board. The new president must not expect to manipulate the Board with selective information. Keeping the Board abreast of issues on the campus in a timely manner and fully informed about programs' successes and failures will be crucial. The new president must have experience with running a quality-based institution. Probably the most important item on the president's agenda will be establishing, in collaboration with the Board and vested members of the campus community, measures of quality for the Board to track over time that reflect how well our campus is meeting students needs. The latter will be the basis of creating an excellent student-centered college. By attending to the above issues the president will have moved the College into the realm of world-class institutions and as such we should be candidates for statewide and national recognition awards and grants.