Long before fall finals, even before Halloween, the 16th president of Iowa State University will be selected.

Dean Luis Rico-Gutierrez is one of many working to find a president that represents the Iowa State community as a whole and works to uphold the land-grant mission.

While other universities, such as Auburn University, did not include their community in the decision of who their next president should be, Rico-Gutierrez wants to give all students, faculty and staff a voice.

“I think the bottom line is we’d really appreciate the opinion of everybody. The committee members, this is a service position,” Rico-Gutierrez said. “We’re all there representing groups of people in the university and our job is to receive information of the candidates, but also to represent the voices of everybody in the university.”

Rico-Gutierrez is co-chair of the presidential search committee along with Dan Houston, president and CEO of Principal Financial Group. The rest of the committee is made up of Iowa State faculty members, including Faculty Senate President Tim Day, staff members and several Iowa regents.

Student Government President Cody West and Graduate and Professional Student Senate President Vivek J. Lawana are the only two students on the committee.  

There are two parts to the process, Rico-Gutierrez said, the first of which will be confidential. Rico-Gutierrez explained the importance of protecting privacy of their candidates at least at the beginning of the search.

“Iowa State is a destination. This is a place that I feel people want to come and become president. Because of that, we expect to have a very high level of candidates participating in this,” Rico-Gutierrez said. “Which means that they already will have very high level jobs somewhere else.”

He said if privacy is not offered for at least the initial screening, many of these candidates may have been discouraged from applying.

“The intention really is we want to have the highest caliber of applicants, as many as we can, so we can have depth in that initial pool,” Rico-Gutierrez said.

The application deadline is Thursday, giving the search committee less than three weeks to review. The committee must select the semi-finalists by Sept. 12, which Rico-Gutierrez said will likely range between eight and 12 candidates.

On Sept. 26 and 27, the semifinalists will be interviewed off campus at a neutral location.

From those interviews, the list will be reduced once again and the finalists will be invited to campus where open forums will be held for the community to take part in. These campus visits will take place Oct. 9 through 13.

“We really value input from everybody at the university. The presidency is a very special position. They impact every single person at this institution. So it’s all students, all staff, all faculty,” Rico-Gutierrez said. “We’re going to have open forums and when [the candidates] are here, there are going to be special sessions with different groups.”

Open forums were also held in June to get community input before the search began. Rico-Gutierrez said this input was used to shape the job description found on presidentsearch.iastate.edu.

“It was an amazing process to go through to writing [the position description]. We got opinions from every member. We’re all more or less in sync,” Rico-Gutierrez said. “We want somebody that treasures the land grant mission of teaching, of making sure that we create knowledge and we disseminate that knowledge for the benefit of Iowa, obviously, and the world in general.”

After the community input, the final decision will be that of the Iowa Board of Regents. On Oct. 23, the search committee will present all the information to the board and the board will use this to decide who will be the next Iowa State president.

“In terms of service to the university, it’s a very special honor,” Rico-Gutierrez said. “My background… it’s about giving voice to people in processes that will have an impact on them. So for me, this was a great opportunity to put this in practice, to make sure that we open the process as much as possible when we can.”

Interim President Benjamin Allen told the Iowa State Daily editorial staff he is taking steps to ensure a smooth transition when the next president is chosen. This includes making decisions over open positions.

“Some of these things, you either want to make a decision on hiring someone or make a decision to delay,” Allen said. “So we had to decide these are the jobs that we should delay before the new person comes here, these are the jobs we should decide.”

Even in positions they decide to wait on, Allen said they are still laying the groundwork.

Based off the amount of applications already received, Rico-Gutierrez is optimistic that the search committee will make all the layout deadlines, but added that nothing is set in stone.

“From what I’m hearing right now, we’ll have great depth, we’ll be able to move with the timeline the way it is, so I don’t foresee any changes,” Rico-Gutierrez said.

Rico-Gutierrez encourages people to not only reach out to him with any opinions or feedback pertaining to the presidential search, but to also reach out to the two students on the search committee.