University trustee Steve Cahillane (Weinberg ’87), who chairs the search committee for Northwestern’s 18th president, sat down with The Daily on Wednesday to explain the qualities committee members seek in candidates for the role.
The search officially launched in December. While formal interviews have not yet started, Cahillane said the current plan is to make an announcement in the spring. He added that they will be “casting a wide net,” considering both internal and external candidates.
The trustee and current CEO of The Kraft Heinz Company said the board’s role in choosing University leadership is its “most important.” It will make the choice based on recommendations from the search committee.
“Given the opportunity to help guide that, it was a bit humbling,” he said. “I need to make sure I do a good job now.”
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: Can you talk a little bit about what you’re looking for in the next University president?
Cahillane: The person has to come with a great deal of credibility — academic credibility, intellectual credibility — and eminence. I mean, this is one of the great universities in the world, and they have to be up for the job. They have to care deeply about the student community. I think that’s incredibly important. They can’t be just an intellectual and just a giant in the world, but they have to care deeply about the undergraduate experience, graduate students and students in general…
They have to have very good financial judgment. Running a large university with a research program like we have, a medical program like we have, it’s highly complex. You have to make tough decisions about how to spend money, how to budget money and how to manage the University, much like you’d manage a business. But, it’s not a business. It’s a part of society that is incredibly important, does incredibly important work — not only in educating the next generation of leaders in the world, but also the research enterprise and all that that comes with.
They need to be a trust builder in the community. There’s lots of stakeholders. There’s the students, the faculty, the staff, the alumni. There’s a lot of people that are vested and invested in Northwestern, and this person has got to be a great communicator, a great listener and really, somebody who can keep the community together and listen to all voices and take the University forward. I also think they have to defend the school and be a defender of free speech and a defender of academic freedom, and stand up for what we believe in. So, all those things are important, and we’re looking for somebody who can embody all of that…
The Daily: How much is faculty or student input from that listening session going to weigh into the search?
Cahillane: It’s incredibly important. This next leader has to be a convener of all the different stakeholders and a community builder. Students and faculty are the biggest parts of that community — and alumni, obviously, we have a huge alumni base. I’ve attended those listening sessions. And like I said, another one tonight with the student government. The faculty listening sessions have been very rich and very important. And so all of that has informed the committee on what is important in terms of the characteristics we’re looking for. The question I answered earlier, a lot of that came from those listening sessions, hearing what’s important.
The Daily: We’ve noticed that there aren’t undergraduate representatives on the committee. What goes into that decision, and why isn’t there that undergraduate student representation?
Cahillane: We started with the premise that the listening sessions were incredibly important, and we wanted to hear from everybody in the community. You don’t have to be on the committee to be heard, right? We had a committee that was very large last time we went through it, and large doesn’t always mean effective. In fact, it can make it a little bit ineffective…
We have a (graduate) student on the search committee. He graduated only last year, so I feel like his connection as an undergrad is not like mine…
Together with the listening sessions that we’ve done, I feel like the undergraduate voice is absolutely being heard, and the decision is not a committee decision. It is a Board of Trustees decision. It’s the charter members of the Board of Trustees that ultimately make that decision. Everybody’s voice is being heard through the committee and through the listening sessions, and I feel like we’re pretty well connected to the undergraduates. I’m sure not everybody’s going to agree with me, but that was the motivation.
The Daily: I wanted to go back to something that you said a little bit earlier about the president’s role being that of a defender of the University. When we’ve been talking to some faculty and students about what they hope to see in the next president, it was also something that they brought up. What does that defender role look like to you?
Cahillane: I can only talk on behalf of the search committee and myself, not for the Board of Trustees, but I think that one of the most important things that we have as a university is our freedom to operate the way we would like to operate, which means that we hire the people that we want to hire, we admit the students that we want to admit and we say the things that we feel are important to say.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we take a view on everything that’s happening around the world, but you have to balance that with the care for the University and the protection of the University. It’s a balance around all of those things. (Interim President Henry Bienen) has talked very forcefully around the importance of being able to keep our independence, hire who we want to hire and say what we want to say.
Emily Lichty contributed reporting.
A previous version of this story mischaracterized where the search committee plans to find candidates. The Daily regrets this error.
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