Following the announcement of the appointment of Christopher Eisgruber’83 as the next University president, The Daily Princetonian sat down with Katie Hall’80, the chair of the search committee and the University Board of Trustees, to discuss the details behind the election. Hall explained that she consulted with at least two former search committee members who were part of the selection process for current President Shirley Tilghman and that Eisgruber was offered the job last week.
The Daily Princetonian:How was your experience chairing the search committee?
Katie Hall:You know, this was a fabulous experience. We had, from the beginning, set up our search committee to have a broad diversity of views, backgrounds, different constituents and the group really just came together so well. We worked hard, took a lot of time, but I think it really developed a very intense sense of shared purpose, camaraderie. It was a great experience.
DP:Yale chose its provost about a month after their current president resigned. Why did Princeton take so long to choose its provost?
KH:We chose the best person for the job and I believe that the way to discern kind of the truth and the strength of that statement is to do what we did. We started with a clean slate, we really did talk to this wide variety of people, sought different viewpoints, different perspectives. And I think it’s from that, that I really can say with confidence that Chris is the best candidate.
DP:I think you were asked this before, but how many people did you interview?
KH:You know, we’re not going to comment on the details of the process. As I said really early on … it’s not because we’re trying to be lacking transparency. An important part of the process is the confidentiality. The strength of that permits both the committee members to have completely open and candid conversations, and it really does permit people willing to engage with us in the process to feel that they themselves would be safe, right, if things went a different way they wouldn’t be embarrassed in any way, shape or form if it didn’t go their way. And it really, I think, let us have an even stronger pool of people that we were talking to and I think, in the end, it really is, it’s in Princeton’s best interest that that’s how we conducted it.
DP:So what did you actually discuss this morning?
KH:Again, the way that it actually goes forward is that the committee recommends to the board and it’s the board that actually has to approve it. And so we went through sort of the formal process and I shared an update on the process with the board and went through some of the key attributes we were looking for, some of the guiding principles we talked about in previous executive sessions of the board and someone said, you know, can we share the names of other candidates and I said the same thing I told you, you know, “no” [laughter].
DP:What about the meeting two weeks ago? Was anything related to the search committee happening then?
KH:As part of our regular board meetings, I, as chair of the search committee, would provide an update at the board meetings, but that’s what took place at the board meetings last weekend.
DP:Were you down to one candidate by then?
KH:You know, we’re not going to talk about the process or the final candidates.
DP:So on the one hand, Provost Eisgruber says, “I just found out 10 minutes ago ...”
KH:Well, he was giving you the technical response, but I called him a week or so ago and said that the committee had come forward with this recommendation that they were going to bring forth to the board...The committee’s job is to bring forth a recommendation of a candidate. It’s the board’s decision to vote. It happened at the board meeting today and then I went and got Chris and then he came into the meeting.
DP:When was this meeting scheduled initially? This extraordinary meeting?
KH:The past week or so.
DP:So you chaired the search committee, on which there were four faculty members. However, you are not a person from academia. How did you feel you were prepared or unprepared to chair a search committee for the president of a university?
KH:That’s a really good question because I have been involved in my business life in different searches of all different levels, but I had not been involved in a search like this. In fact, most people hadn’t. I had a couple of things that were really helpful to me. I had the advice and counsel of Bob Rawson [’66], who chaired the search committee that resulted in Shirley coming in, who was very generous with his time, as well as Tom Wright [’62] who was secretary to that committee. Of our current trustees, there are four current trustees who are actually on the search committee that resulted in Shirley. So we as a board had history about how these processes work and then to have Brent and Bob who essentially got through it before. So that’s essentially a literal answer to the question.
I think the other way that sort of I and the committee collectively learned was really working together. I mean, we knew what our charge was, we spent a lot of time listening in the first phase. I don’t know if you went to any of those forums. And the process of sort of asking our key opening questions, you know, “what do people see as the challenges and opportunities of Princeton?” You know, “what kind of attributes should we be seeking in the president, what, any, specific candidates?” You know, by virtue of having those sort of broad-ranging conversations in all cases basically asking those questions we were able then to develop our own framework, our own process.
DP:Did you use any sort of executive search firm?
KH:We did not use a search firm. People who use search firms are, one, if you feel like you need to have someone identify your pool of candidates. We thought we were really—in fact, we thought it was one of our primary responsibilities to develop a strong pool of candidates. Another is if you need to do due diligence and we felt we had the capacity to do due diligence if there was something specific that we could hire specific resources. And three, the other reason that people hire firms is because [the firms] are professionals and [can manage] the logistics of things. There’s a lot of logistics involved in these things and um, in that place to have Bob Durkee’69, who was the executive to the search committee, who did an extraordinary job, he and his whole office here provided the kind of support. Again, it was extraordinary what they were able to do. I mean, just the sheer logistics of it, I mean all the advice. I mean, the logistic side of it too, which is really meaningful, tracking these things, having our website go up, summarizing all of this, having our meeting notes. I mean all of these things were really important in keeping the process going forward and having that resource really helped us out.
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