Presidential Search Committee Aiming for Candidate in April

Three members of the Presidential Search Committee recently met with employees in two sessions to report about progress toward finding a new president for Bethel University after President George Brushaber retires next June.

Trustees Pat Mazorol and Harold Wiens as well as seminary faculty member Jeannine Brown represented the search committee and outlined a pre-search and search process that began last fall. Brown said that the search has surfaced “a number of candidates, not just a few,” and added that “about a dozen or so are looking at Bethel and we’re looking at them,” including candidates of both genders and internal as well as external candidates. “We’re keeping the focus wide at this point,” she emphasized.

Candidates may still be nominated for the position through the end of December 2007. By the end of March, Brown said, it’s the committee’s goal to finish interviews and have two or three “fabulous candidates.” Sometime in April, the committee hopes to bring a recommended candidate to the Bethel Board of Trustees and to campus. The selected candidate would need to be approved by the Bethel Corporation at its biennial meeting the end of June.

In response to a question about the type of individual committee members are looking for, Mazorol said they are open to “non-traditional candidates; people who can bring experience from other parts of society; not necessarily someone who would be here for 25 years.” All three committee representatives stressed that they are placing a high priority on a leader who is a consensus builder, as well as someone who can build bridges to other cultures and races.

The new presidential position for Bethel has been advertised in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist Online, Black Issues in Higher Education, and Hispanic Outlook. The executive search firm People Management International, Inc. has been retained to help with the search on an advisory basis, beginning with interviews with more than 80 Bethel stakeholders from 18 distinct constituent groups early this year. The firm is also lending its psychometric profiling tools to the process and provides a sense of confidentiality for the candidates, but Mazorol stressed that the search is being conducted very actively by the Bethel committee itself.

The Presidential Search Committee members consists of nine trustees, three faculty members (including two members of the Bethel Anti-Racism and Reconciliation Commission), and a representative at large−youth pastor Heather Heinsch Flies, a graduate of what is now the College of Arts & Sciences as well as Bethel Seminary.

Brown invited employees to send any input or further nominations to the Presidential Search Committee using the online form at
www.bethel.edu/presidential-search/forms/input. She and Harold Wiens, who also serves as chair of the Search Advisory Committee, both assured employees that their concerns and input would be passed along “unfiltered” to the full committee.

“The goal of the search is to find the person whom God has prepared for the next president of Bethel University,” Wiens concluded. “It’s an open book quiz. We do have the Word, and we can take the matter to our God in prayer.”