After concluding the search for four vacant dean positions with the appointment of Laura Siminoff earlier this month as dean of the College of Health Professions and Social Work, the university is turning to another search – this one within the president’s cabinet.
The university posted a job opening earlier this month for vice president of Institutional Advancement on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. The position is currently held by the interim senior vice president for Institutional Advancement Tilghman Moyer.
Moyer said in an interview in August that he was told by the president that he is expected to be a candidate for the position.
“My goal is that I will be here a long time,” Moyer said.
The university is employing the search firm Witt/Kieffer – the same firm used by the Board of Trustees’ presidential search committee – to assist in the search. No timetable has been set for when the search will be completed.
Theobald said in an interview at the start of the semester that the university has already started to identify candidates for the position.
“We’ve identified a set of candidates, [Witt/Kieffer] will obviously bring other people to the table,” Theobald said. “We hope to move very quickly on that.”
David Unruh, the former senior vice president for Institutional Advancement, resigned in December 2012, a month before Theobald took office.
“We just want to do things in different ways and that happens when new leadership comes in,” Theobald said of the resignation in an interview in January.
Theobald declined requests to be interviewed for this story.
“Temple University is dedicated to finding the best possible people for these key roles,” said Ray Betzner, a university spokesman, in a statement. “This is an important period in Temple¹s history and having the strongest possible leadership team will be essential in building Temple¹s future.”
The president’s cabinet has seen other transitions since Theobald took office on Jan. 1.
The university announced former Athletic Director Bill Bradshaw’s retirement in May and the president’s senior adviser, Kevin Clark, replaced him as interim athletic director. When it announced Bradshaw’s retirement, the university said it would conduct a national search to fill the void, but the search was canceled earlier this month when Clark was named vice president and athletic director.
Clark was one of two university officers appointed by Theobald this year. In April, Theobald named Karen Clarke the vice president for strategic marketing and communications, a position created by the president when he took office.
Clarke’s position was created because the university does “not do nearly a good enough job of telling our story,” Theobald said in an interview shortly after he took office.
The position put into place what officials labeled as a more traditional communications structure, which brought University Communications and Institutional Advancement communications’ under the same vice president. Previously the two were split between the senior vice president of government, community and public affairs and the senior vice president of Institutional Advancement, respectively.
Anthony Wagner, the former executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer, left the university earlier this year to become the executive vice president for administration and finance and chief business officer at Georgia Regents University and Health System in Augusta, Ga.
The former senior associate vice president for finance and human resources, Ken Kaiser, is serving as interim CFO and treasurer and is overseeing the implementation of a decentralized budget system at Temple.
Theobald said in an interview in August that Kaiser will serve in an interim role for a year before the university carries out a search next summer.
The president made one other personnel change within his cabinet this year when he appointed Vice President William Bergman as a special assistant to the president in July.
Sean Carlin can be reached at sean.carlin@temple.edu or follow on Twitter @SeanCarlin84.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Laura Siminoff was appointed dean of CHPSW last week. The university announced the appointment on Nov. 3.
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