PSU hires firm to pick new vice provost

After two years without a permanent replacement for the vice provost of student affairs, Portland State is in its third round and third year of searches to fill the position, this time enlisting the services of an outside firm.

Roy Koch, PSU provost and vice president of academic affairs, said he estimates that the university will spend $20,000 to have outside firm EFL Associates contact and screen potential applicants from around the country for the position.

EFL Associates told Student Affairs staff this spring that they hoped to have a large enough pool of candidates that they could conduct phone interviews in September and bring finalists to campus in the fall, according to Dan Fortmiller, interim vice provost.

When the position was first opened in 2005, no applicants were invited to visit. The size of the candidate pool was a hurdle in the second round of the search, which did not produce acceptable candidates until Fortmiller had already held the position for nearly a year. Only one candidate advanced to the campus visit round this past November, and he was not deemed a good fit, Koch said.

According to Ryan Klute, a graduate student who served on the search committee until resigning last week, the length and timing of the process exacerbated the problem of having a small pool to choose from.

“In this bureaucracy sinkhole, it takes forever,” he said. “During our waiting period, people dropped out. People we liked.”

Klute is glad to see the university use an external firm.

“I believe in that process. It costs money, but that’s okay,” he said.

The $20,000 price tag will give PSU access to the specialized services of the search firm, namely the firm’s catalog of candidates and workers who have time to actively recruit them. For the PSU search committee-comprised of faculty, staff and students with other jobs to worry about-the process was more a case of waiting for applications to come in, Koch said.

Paying a search firm also frees PSU from paying someone to do the administrative work, Koch said.

“I think it’s a great investment,” he said. “We could have either hired someone part-time, in which case we wouldn’t get the recruitment, or we could have had [existing] staff do the work, in which case something else wouldn’t get done.”

The vice provost for student affairs oversees key functions of the university from admissions, registration and records to the Student Health Center and the Career Center. Much of this falls under the broad category of enrollment management.

Enrollment management is “how you make sure you are able to recruit, retain and graduate the students you want to have at your institution,” Fortmiller said. “It’s experiences both in and out of the classroom.”

The vice provost must also provide direction for a growing university.

Koch said that EFL Associates is one of the few firms that will do a lower-cost partial search, turning over names of initially screened candidates to the search committee for further narrowing.

“We haven’t used a search firm before, but we didn’t want to do the same thing over again and expect a different result,” Koch said.

Fortmiller has filled the vice provost position since July 2005, when Doug Samuels left the administration to teach in the Black Studies department. Fortmiller says he plans to return to his former post as director of the Undergraduate Advising and Support Center when a replacement is hired.

Marvin Kaiser, who has headed the search committee since last August, said that leadership means asking questions about the size and mix of the future student population, as well as supporting the students who are already enrolled.

“It’s a pretty broad set of agendas,” Kaiser said. In the second round, “we didn’t get enough people with a foot in both camps.”

Koch also emphasized the importance of handling expansion.

“We’ve grown pretty rapidly. We haven’t really kept up with providing capabilities like we’d like.”

Being charged with giving students all the resources they need to succeed is a job with vague borders. Fortmiller credits his staff with making the task manageable.

“If I had to do that all by myself, [I’d] never get to go home,” Fortmiller said.