The Evergreen State College’s board extends presidential search to do more background checks
The Evergreen State College’s Board of Trustees decided Thursday to extend its search for a new college president.
The board decided to extend the search’s timeline to give Karras Consulting more time to do what board Chairwoman Karen Fraser called “appropriate backgrounding” of the finalists.
Sixty-three people applied and were reviewed for the position of Evergreen president, said Sandra Kaiser, vice president for college relations. The college received applications from a diverse, high-caliber group of people from throughout the country, she said.
The board has since interviewed seven candidates and is expected to narrow the list from there.
If Karras Consulting sounds familiar, that’s because the business, which specializes in public sector executive searches, was involved in the search for a new Olympia police chief. However, after the city announced its four finalists for the job, a local journalist with the Olympia Tribune raised a concern with city about finalist Derrick Turner. Turner, a Google search revealed, had been reprimanded for grabbing a man by the throat during a 2017 arrest in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
After that came to light, the city announced it was pausing its search.
“There are no excuses from us,” Dennis Karras, of Karras Consulting, said in a city news release announcing that decision. “This was clearly an oversight on our part.”
Evergreen agreed last year to pay Karras up to $64,500 to recruit a new college president. The college also said that Karras would be reimbursed for up to $2,000 for advertising and up to $1,000 for travel costs per out-of-state finalist.
However, Evergreen’s Kaiser said that wanting more time to do background checks on the candidates was less about what happened in Olympia, and more about wanting to avoid what recently happened at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
There, President F. King Alexander recently resigned after officials at Louisiana State University, his former employer, disputed how he had handled sexual misconduct allegations against former football coach Les Miles, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Once background checks are completed on Evergreen’s finalists, Evergreen will give people an opportunity to meet the candidates through remote public forums in late April, before the board makes its decision in May, Kaiser said.
Current President George Bridges, who came to Evergreen after serving as president of Whitman College in Eastern Washington, announced last year his decision to retire and return to teaching.
This story was originally published April 4, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
