UW-Madison chancellor search hits snag

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/21/2008 8:17 pm

Don't expect a new University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor to be named until next week.

A five-member Board of Regents chancellor search committee, chaired by Madison lawyer David Walsh, had hoped to settle on a top candidate to replace John Wiley during a private conference call Wednesday.

Following the call, the committee and UW System President Kevin Reilly had planned to offer the UW-Madison chancellor post to one of four finalists.

But Walsh said Wednesday evening that his group "did not come to a conclusion."

Therefore, Walsh said the chancellor search committee will meet again on Tuesday at 8:30 a.m.

This turn of events is somewhat surprising as some within the UW System had indicated an announcement of who would replace Wiley as the leader of Wisconsin's flagship university could come as early as Thursday or Friday.

UW-Madison received 55 applications for the chancellor opening. All four chancellor finalists interviewed May 14 with Reilly and the search committee.

The next chancellor still is expected to officially be appointed at the next Board of Regents meeting June 5 to 6 at UW-Milwaukee.

Wiley has led UW-Madison since 2001 and is leaving his post in September.

The chancellor finalists are:

• Rebecca Blank, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan from 1999-2007. Blank, who is currently on leave from Michigan and is a visiting senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., was on the President's Council of Economic Advisers under former President Clinton from 1997-99.
• Carolyn Martin, the provost at Cornell University, an Ivy League school in Ithaca, N.Y. Martin was a lecturer at UW-Madison in the early 1980s and earned her doctorate from UW-Madison in 1985 in German Literature before moving on to Cornell.
• Tim Mulcahy, who has been vice president for research at the University of Minnesota since February 2005. Mulcahy spent 20 years at UW-Madison, including as associate vice chancellor for research policy from 2002 to 2005.
• Gary Sandefur, UW-Madison's dean of the College of Letters and Sciences since 2004. He has spent the past 24 years on the UW campus and currently oversees 39 departments in the arts and humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. More than half of UW-Madison's students are enrolled in Sandefur's college, which employs about 3,000 people.

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/21/2008 8:17 pm