The University's next provost will come from within Brown, President Ruth Simmons told the faculty at its monthly meeting Tuesday.
In order to provide for administrative continuity and ensure the University maintains momentum, Simmons said she intends to appoint a new provost by the end of June, when Provost Robert Zimmer will leave Brown to become president of the University of Chicago.
Such a quick search only allows for serious consideration of internal candidates. Simmons said though some professors have encouraged her to consider bringing an outsider to the University as provost, she does not intend to conduct a lengthy national search.
Simmons said she has been accepting nominations and consulting with department chairs, multidisciplinary center directors, senior administrators and members of the Brown Corporation to identify current Brown professors who are well-suited for the post.
Simmons also updated the faculty on the other current searches to fill senior administrative posts. Both the dean of the college and the vice president for research posts will be vacated this summer.
The dean of the college search committee has been accepting nominations for a search that will be primarily internal but will also consider candidates from outside the University, Simmons said.
The search committee for a new vice president for research has completed its work and submitted its recommendation, Simmons said, adding that she will act on the recommendation "in the very near future" and expects to announce the new appointment by the end of the month.
In other business, Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Huidekoper updated the faculty on the review of the Brown Bookstore in what she called an effort to clarify misconceptions that have arisen.
Huidekoper stressed that important concerns have been raised for both operating models under consideration - outsourcing the bookstore to an external vendor such as Barnes and Noble College Booksellers and keeping it independent under University management.
The Bookstore Review Committee, which Huidekoper chairs, released a report March 3 recommending that the bookstore be outsourced to an external vendor. The committee's report sparked the creation of the Save the Bookstore Coalition, which has rallied to keep the bookstore independent.
Huidekoper said the committee will host two open forums in late April to solicit more feedback, construct a preliminary plan for the self-operation model and reconsider its findings before making a final recommendation to the president's cabinet. The cabinet, which comprises about a dozen top University administrators, will likely make the final decision before students leave campus at the end of the academic year. If administrators are not ready to act at that time, they will wait until the fall to make a decision so that a decision is not made over the summer when students are away from campus, Huidekoper said.
Peter Sprake '07, a customer service clerk at the bookstore and Save the Bookstore Coalition member who originally enrolled in 1966, left Brown before graduating and re-enrolled in 2001, and two other opponents of outsourcing distributed informational flyers to faculty members as they entered the Salomon Center to attend the meeting.
Two professors raised concerns about outsourcing at the meeting. One professor stressed the high quality of service and loyalty to the institution provided by employees of the independent bookstore.
"We can't just let these people go off into the sunset," the professor said, referring to the current bookstore employees.
Huidekoper agreed that the bookstore's employees are valuable and would play a key role in the future of the bookstore under either operating scenario.
Another professor, who worked at Rutgers University when that institution's bookstore was outsourced, said the results at Rutgers were "disastrous," especially in terms of academic service and personnel issues.
The only other person to speak about the bookstore at the meeting, University Registrar Michael Pesta, stressed that textbook sales ought to be the "central issue" in the review.
"If there is any threat to textbooks" under one of the operating models, "everything else must be swept off the table," Pesta said.
Huidekoper agreed and pointed out that the impact of outsourcing on textbook sales is a key component of the committee's report.
In other business, Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P'07 told the faculty that the University has hired 30 new professors to start next semester and about 20 additional searches are still ongoing. Fifteen of the 30 new hires are women, and six of the 12 new professors in the physical sciences are women, Vohra said.
Also Tuesday, Dean of the College Paul Armstrong announced that Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Esther Whitfield is the recipient of the 2006-2007 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, which is awarded annually to junior, non-tenured members of the faculty. The fellowship recipient is awarded one semester of leave, with full compensation, to pursue a research project or prepare new contributions to the College curriculum.
In addition to serving as a thesis adviser and academic adviser for first-years and sophomores, Whitfield has developed nine new courses at Brown, primarily involving Caribbean and Latin American literature, Armstrong said.
