Blake turns down vice-provost job

Peg L. Blake, the candidate a Portland State search committee chose to fill the vacant vice provost of Student Affairs position, declined the university’s offer for the position because she does not want to uproot her family from their home in southern Oregon.

The PSU job was a great opportunity, Blake said, but she didn’t want to make her sixth-grade daughter and high school-aged son move to a different town.

“We moved them here and they really love it,” she said about Ashland, Ore.

Blake currently works as the dean of enrollment management at Southern Oregon University.

Blake was one of three finalists to fill the vice provost of Student Affairs spot, which oversees all parts of the university related to student involvement and success, such as the Women’s Resource Center, new student orientation, all student groups, the tutoring centers and the Center for Student Health and Counseling.

The committee will continue with the search they started at the beginning of fall term, which resulted in the selections of Blake, Louisiana State University’s Neil Matthews and Tim Quinnan of Stark State College in Ohio, as finalists for the position.

Dan Fortmiller has spent the last two years as interim vice provost of Student Affairs, and took over after the previous vice provost left in 2005. The previous vice provost, Douglas Samuels, filed a lawsuit against Portland State on charges of racial discrimination in late September.

Nick Walden-Poublon, the student government university affairs director and a member of the vice-provost search committee, said the committee does not consider the search a failure. Often, when a first choice candidate does not work, search committees will have a second choice readily available.

Walden-Poublon would not say whether the committee planned to ask one of the other two candidates to fill the position. He would not also say whether the committee would look at candidates who were not selected as finalists.

Blake was selected because she was very easy to approach, responsive and seemed to have the background that students were looking for, Walden-Poublon said. Blake had good ideas about how to run a health center, which he said was a big student concern, and that she was not condescending to students.

“I felt like Peg interacted the best with students,” he said.

Walden-Poublon said the search committee plans to exhaust every option before saying that the search has failed. A search committee tried to fill the vice provost spot in November of 2006, but the search was not successful.

“We aren’t going to be quick to throw our hands up,” he said.

Blake said she loved Portland State, its faculty and its students.

“I very reluctantly declined the offer. It was a terrific opportunity,” she said, adding that her family has to come first. “You only get one shot at raising your kids and doing that right, and that has to be a priority.”