First finalist for SPEA dean to visit

The first of four finalists for the position of dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs will be in Bloomington Tuesday, said Lauren Robel, dean of the School of Law and chair of the search committee.\nThough no schedule has been solidified yet, Robel said students will probably be able to meet and speak with the candidate Tuesday. Robel said she and Julie Bennett Dreesen, secretary at the office of the Vice President for Information Technology, are working to find a time when students involved in SPEA leadership programs can interview the first candidate, Barbara S. Romzek.\nRomzek is the current associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas.\nThe other candidates for dean position are John Graham, dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, Calif., Greg Lindsey, associate dean of SPEA and the Duey-Murphy Professor of Rural Land Policy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and John Applegate, the Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law at the IU School of Law-Bloomington, according to the press release.\n“They’re all accomplished people, they all presented a vision, they all understood the competitive landscape for schools like SPEA and they present different kinds of profiles,” Robel said.\nThe most important quality of each candidate, Robel said, is their vision for maintaining the top-ranking program established at SPEA.\nThe search committee is working to create a time that students can meet the finalists while each candidate is on campus, even though the future dean of SPEA probably won’t ever meet most students, Robel said. \n“The dean of a school this size is going to have a big impact on students in the sense that the person is helping to direct the future of that school,” Robel said. “But not on that sort of day-to-day operation level.”