Presidential Search Update, December 17, 2012

The following update was distributed to the Kenyon students and employees via email on December 17, 2012.

Dear members of the Kenyon community:

We are pleased to provide a brief update on Kenyon's presidential search. Since we last communicated with you in early November (https://today.kenyon.edu/node/347), we and our search consultants from Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates have been making our position prospectus available(http://documents.kenyon.edu/humanresources/kenyonpresidentialprospectus.pdf) to leaders in higher education and in other fields who can offer nominations and have been actively soliciting candidates, building on our published advertisements and extensive outreach since the launch of the campaign in August. We and our search consultants have also been following up on the many suggestions and nominations that have come to us from those contacts and from you and others in the Kenyon community.

The size of the candidate pool grows daily. The search consultants report great respect for the College and enthusiasm about the opportunity to lead it among the nominators, nominees, and other prospects with whom they have spoken. They anticipate a strong pool of candidates that the search committee will narrow in coming months by careful reading of the dossiers and interviews with the strongest aspirants. We thus look to the new year eager to learn more about prospective presidents and remain very confident that we will be able to make our final recommendations to the Board of Trustees in the spring.

The search committee relied heavily on the input you gave at our public forum, through the committee's survey, and in direct comments to us to formulate our search prospectus. We again thank the many, many Kenyon students, faculty, staff and administrators, alumni, and parents who participated in the survey and gave us many detailed comments and suggestions. Thanks, too, for your nominations. The committee remains interested in your comments and suggestions, which can be sent to presidentialsearch@kenyon.edu.

We extend our very best in this holiday season and particularly wish you peace, mindful of the terrible tragedy in Newtown which has so deeply affected all of us.

Sincerely,

Brackett Denniston '69, Chair, Presidential Search Committee
Aileen Hefferren '88, Vice-chair