It's been more than 400 days since former University President James Duderstadt announced his resignation. Now, the Board of Regents is most likely hours away from selecting his successor.
The board is scheduled to begin public deliberations about the four finalists at 9 a.m. today in the Fleming Administration Building. They have spent the past two weeks publicly interviewing the candidates, watching their interactions with the University community at town-hall-type meetings and socializing with them over dinner.
The four finalists are: Lee Bollinger, Dartmouth provost and former Law School dean; Stanley Chodorow, provost at the University of Pennsylvania; Carol Christ, vice chancellor and provost at the University of California-Berkeley; and Larry Faulkner, vice chancellor and provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Three of the candidates will remain at their institutions, while one will likely lead the maize and blue into the next century. The board can still add finalists to the list, but no regent has indicated a desire to do so.
The regents have spent the past week reviewing transcripts from the sessions, as well as conducting reference checks and soliciting opinions from members of the University community.
Since this is the first time a University president will be chosen publicly, regents said they're not sure about the structure of today's meeting.
"It will be difficult to predict what's going to happen," said Regent Andrea Fischer Newman (R-Ann Arbor). "Our plan is to start at 9 o'clock and see what happens from there."
As finalists, the four candidates agreed to be interviewed and discussed in a public setting, as required by the state's Open Meetings Act. Between state laws and a recent court decision, the search for the 12th president has been the most public search in University history.
Throughout the past year, the regents and Presidential Search Advisory Committee members have continuously expressed the difficulties created by a public search - many strong potential candidates, including current university presidents, are not willing to be considered publicly.
"I feel we were extremely, extremely lucky," PSAC Chair Jeffrey Lehman said after announcing the committee's four recommendations.
"I feel as though the heavens have been smiling on the University of Michigan. I cannot say that I would expect us to ever be so lucky again," he said.
The four candidates look similar on paper: They've all been provosts at major institutions since 1994, all support tenure and affirmative action, and all have backgrounds in the arts and sciences.
During the interviews and town-meeting sessions, each candidate acknowledged the challenges facing Michigan: health-care changes affecting University Hospitals, the need to improve undergraduate education while maintaining research and the necessity to restore the public's confidence in state universities. They also praised the University and the unique responsibilities a large public institution has to society.
Lehman said each candidate fits the criteria the regents outlined last spring - qualifications that some have termed "God on a good day." However, Lehman said that each candidate would bring something different to the University.
"Each of these people would leave a profound stamp on the University of Michigan," Lehman said at the Oct. 17 meeting when he announced the finalists. "Each stamp would be decidedly different, and the choice of which stamp is significant."
Each candidate has a different area of academic interest (ranging from medieval history to electrochemistry) and each came to the public interviews and town-hall meetings with different visions for the future of the University.
Vice President for University Relations Walter Harrison said individual regents are unsure what other members of the board are thinking because they are not allowed to privately discuss candidates with each other or with a PSAC member.
"Part of the difficulty is that they don't know how each other feels," Harrison said.
In today's meeting, the board will publicly decide if they "can reach a meeting of the minds of who the best candidate is," Harrison said.
Newman said the board will be careful when publicly discussing the four candidates. She said that most likely they will each say what they saw as the candidates' strengths.
"You're picking the one with the best fit," Newman said. "I don't think choosing one says anything less about the other three."