What do students want from the next president?

This is the first part of a four part series, allowing individuals to voice what they want in the next president. The next installations in the series will be published in consecutive weeks.

Part II: Faculty speak out

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The question is simple: What are you looking for in the new president? We interviewed numerous University of Toledo students and this is what they had to say:

Student-centeredness

President of Campus Activities and Planning (CAP) Andrew Kurtz said he thinks student-centeredness is a must-have trait of the next president, something he feels was not a priority for the last president, Lloyd Jacobs.

“I think that our previous president, not Nagi, but our previous full-term president [Jacobs] had his strengths, but relating to the student body wasn’t one of them,” Kurtz said.

According to Spectrum President LaVelle Ridley, there is no way to tell how a presidential candidate will perform, but he believes that if the needs of the students are put first, everything else will fall into place.

“I believe that as long as our new president prioritizes the needs of the entire student body and is considerate of the faculty and staff, then they will be on the right track to an excellent presidency,” Ridley said.

Black Student Union President Robert Delk said having a focus on students will remind the president to “actually talk to the students, get to know the students and figure out the problems.”

Students want the opportunity to meet the new president — or at least see him or her around campus.

“I want to know the new president personally,” said Diana Eby, a first-year psychology major. “I want to see their face on campus, not just in their department.”

According to an anonymous online survey created by Deeb Eid, president of the American Pharmacist Association, one student said he wanted a president that will invest in UT’s current students rather than focusing on bringing in more students.

“I feel our university works so hard at bringing in foreign students and diversifying our university, but fails to truly connect and invest in the enrolled students,” the anonymous source said. “I feel we constantly are just looking to establish more outward connections and missing the mark on the bright minds right in front of our eyes in our classrooms.”

Open-mindedness

Students agreed the president should keep an open mind about any issues and ideas presented, whether by student or faculty member.

In terms of diversifying campus, Ridley said he wants the president to “work on retaining faculty and staff that are women and people of color.”

“As a representative of a diverse student organization, I believe that our new president should always seek to foster diversity throughout the university,” Ridley said.

Delk supported that idea, saying the new leader needs to be diversity-trained in order “to deal with the large pool of students.”

“UT is really known for the diverse amount of students they have,” Delk said.

Samantha Knauf, a first-year pharmacy major, emphasized she thinks being a professional president goes hand-in-hand with being open-minded.

“We’re a campus of college kids and they should be open to what we have to say,” Knauf said.

Approachability

Student Government President Clayton Notestine said he expects the president to be “very, very personable” and Knauf said he or she “should definitely be friendly and outgoing.”

“This person should be open-minded, accessible to the students, approachable and easy to work with,” Ridley said.

Ridley believes the president needs to carry himself or herself in a way that is approachable and not stand-offish.

“This person should not be just another administrator that ignores what the students need and want,” Ridley said. “This person should be someone students trust and feel comfortable approaching and communicating with.”

Perseverant and progressive

Samantha Heckman, a third-year engineering major, said the president must be hard-working and flexible as well as “committed to what they are doing and getting it done.”

According to Notestine, working to unite the various groups on campus is an essential presidential duty.

“I personally would like somebody who is going to unite the different groups, that being especially faculty, med campus and students in general,” he said.

Delk pushed this same idea — the president needs to act as a mediator and create dialogue.

“Maybe even go further and meet with student leaders and administrators when an issue comes up,” Delk said. “Make a dialogue between students and administrators to deal with issues and problem-solve. That would generate a good avenue of approach.”

Notestine said he wants to see the new president “be willing to go create systems and support a culture that is pro-change.”

“Barriers have been set up to basically prevent change from happening on campus,” he said. “UT is in a stage of stagnation because we’ve basically designed a university around preventative measures. We want to make sure that nothing bad happens so we prevent anything from happening in the first place.”

Authoritative

Serving as the head of a university sometimes requires force, and students such as Delk and Notestine want the president to be a leader who inspires change.

According to Delk, the new president needs to have a commanding presence.

“Coming in as a president there are a lot of administrators that would try to put their will on them so they would need to command authority,” Delk said. “They need to be affirmative.”

Extroverted

Excellent communication was the most important skill Notestine said he felt the president must have.

“They have to be an extroverted and very competent communicator,” he said.

Notestine said technical skills are sometimes overvalued in a position such as the presidency; rather, he said the fundamental skills like communication and task delegation are crucial because the work becomes less technical.

“It’s a lot like an actual interview,” Notestine said. “You don’t hire the person for their skills because you can teach them the skills. You can teach them individual knowledge about the university. You hire the person for the person that they are.”

Notestine wants to see “communication become paramount,” serving as the front-and-center issue that is tackled immediately after the new president is announced.

“I want whoever it is that we go ahead and put into the position of president of the University of Toledo to be able to hop and break through a lot of those individual fences and get these people to be able to work within the same collective mindset, which is hopefully to improve UT as a whole,” Notestine said.

Taking note from the current interim president

When answering what students want from the next president, Kurtz simply said “it would be him [Nagi Naganathan].”

“A lot of the students are surprised that Nagi wasn’t accepted, disappointed,” Kurtz said. “His interactions with the students and his vision for the university, the fact that he sat down students, he sat down with the business school and asked the students on how we could do better and he listened and cared what you had to say.”

Both Kurtz and Delk hope the new president implements some of the same initiatives Naganathan did, such as having lunch with students, holding “Walk with the President,” hosting town hall meetings and eating Christmas dinner with UT workers.

“He would’ve been perfect, and these other three candidates might be wonderful and more deservingly qualified people but it’s just hard to see when he was good enough for us,” Kurtz said.

Background?

The answers students gave when asked what background they wanted the president to have were varied and ranged from business to education to management as well as engineering or the medical field.

Delk and Knauf both said they wanted their president to come from a business or marketing background.

“Just so they can market the university a lot better and raise morale of the students here,” Delk said. “There are a lot of bad impressions of the University of Toledo. It’s time for a different storm. The new president can actually create something.”

Eby said that although she doesn’t want the president’s background to cause bias, she feels he or she should “have some knowledge in engineering or the medical field since we are a university so based on those.”

However, Kurtz disagreed and said he would prefer the president to have a background in education.

“We’re losing money through the medical school,” Kurtz said. “It’s a good thing for the medical program, but we need to find a better way of subsidizing it and I think someone with an educational background would be more interested in figuring out a way to balance the books as opposed to just making sure that the medical school still exists.”

Kurtz said he doesn’t think UT’s president needs any more help understanding business, especially since the president will be surrounded “with good business minds like chief financial officers and your VPs like Larry Burns.”

“We need someone who understands the educational aspects, how to stimulate the student experience and when it comes down on how to evenly balance the checks-and-balances of the university,” Kurtz said.

Other students such as Notestine, Ridley and anonymous survey-takers said they don’t care what background the president comes from; instead, they place the emphasis on the person’s personality.

“Qualifications and background are always nice, but they are fluff,” said one anonymous student from Eid’s online survery. “I want a president who has a backbone and who has proven they can get work done.”