The Idaho State Board of Education has been in executive session since Thursday to conduct final interviews of the five finalists for the next University of Idaho President.The executive session concludes today, and the board is expected to announce the date of a meeting at which the sole finalist will be revealed later this month. The executive session immediately followed Laurie Stenberg Nichols visit to Idaho this week.
Nichols is no stranger to the Palouse and said her love for the area is one of the reasons she was interested in applying for the UI presidency.
Nichols was the fifth and final candidate to visit Moscow. She spoke about her plans to promote UI’s excellence and address its shortcomings on Tuesday in the Administration Building Auditorium.
“I do have to tell you when the University of Idaho’s presidency became open, it was one I was interested in,” Nichols said. “I love this place, I’m familiar with it, it seemed like it would be a good fit for me.”
Nichols spent six years as a faculty member at UI in the ‘90s and received tenure in 1994 prior to moving to South Dakota State University.
During her time on the Palouse, she married her husband Tim and had their first daughter. She said she would love the opportunity to return to Moscow, if selected as the next president. Nichols used statistics, graphs and her experience as the provost and vice president for academic affairs at South Dakota State University, to show the audience of mostly faculty and staff how UI can be improved over the course of the next presidency.
She said UI should focus on “the big three” of higher education — accountability and transparency, affordability and funding.
For accountability and transparency, Nichols said any leader in higher education should strive to meet these standards and she would do so — if she were president at UI.
“Those are two huge words we’re talking about today, is becoming more and more accountable to our constituents — be they are students, or our legislators or just the general public of the state — making sure we are highly accountable for what we do,” Nichols said. “And then in that, being extremely transparent where we literally put our performance out there for people to see.”
Nichols referred to the Whitehouse’s College Scoreboard as an example of accountability and transparency and talked about UI’s figures in terms of cost, graduation rate and student loans.
Nichols said another priority of hers is keeping college as affordable as possible for current and future students.
“We have to continue to watch our costs,” Nichols said. “It’s just going to be critical to the future of any land grant university in this country.”
Nichols also addressed funding and said it is a huge part of successful higher education institutions. She said it should be easier to receive more funding because an educated population is an investment, not necessarily a cost.
“As those around you who attain more education, their wages raise and so do yours,” Nichols said. “If you add one year of college to the region’s workforce, you will improve the gross domestic product of that region by 17.4 percent and in addition everyone’s wage will go up by at least 8 percent.”
Nichols said higher education is still the “gateway to opportunity” and although people involved in education may know that, others do not.
“We cannot assume others will automatically buy this. There was a time where I think we could, it’s no longer,” Nichols said. “We cannot assume people just know that a college degree is a gateway to opportunity. We have to constantly produce evidence and market the positive impacts that a university has to its community, to its region, to its state and certainly to the individuals who benefit from it.”
At the conclusion of Tuesday’s open forum, Bill Goesling, Idaho State Board of Education member, asked the audience to provide feedback about the presidential candidates at www.uidaho.edu/president/presidential-search/search-finalists.
Amber Emery can be reached at [email protected]