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UW-Madison chancellor search: Mulcahy withdraws name

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/27/2008 6:13 pm

The list of potential candidates to become UW-Madison's next chancellor is down to three.

Tim Mulcahy, who spent 20 years in Madison before leaving to become vice president for research at the University of Minnesota in February of 2005, has withdrawn his name from consideration.

"I was deeply honored to be selected as one of four finalists for the position of chancellor at UW-Madison, an institution with which I have long personal and professional ties and where I count many friends and colleagues among the faculty and staff," he said in a statement. "However, after carefully considering my personal and professional interests I made the difficult decision to withdraw my name from consideration and notified the selection committee of my decision. ... In the end, my personal desire to enjoy quality time with my wife, children, and grandchildren, combined with my professional interest in advancing a wide range of initiatives I have started at the University of Minnesota, led me to this decision."

Attempts to reach Mulcahy for further comment were not successful.

At Minnesota, the 57-year-old Mulcahy is in charge of $600 million in academic research on five campuses. He held a range of jobs at UW-Madison, including as associate vice chancellor for research policy from 2002-05.

The remaining 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.
• 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.

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 last Wednesday. But following that meeting, Walsh said his group "did not come to a conclusion."

The chancellor search committee met again Tuesday. If all goes well, the committee and UW System President Kevin Reilly could offer the UW-Madison chancellor post to one of the three remaining finalists in the next few days.

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

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

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

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/27/2008 6:13 pm