Feb. 3, 2002 – The committee charged with recommending candidates to succeed Dr. Orville Kean as president of the University of the Virgin Islands has presented three names to the Board of Trustees, which will make the decision. The three are, in alphabetical order:
– Dr. Robert R. Jennings, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Future Focus, a futurist think tank engaged in research and training at Wake Forest University's Babcock Graduate School of Management in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
– Dr. Laurence I. Peterson, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and tenured professor of chemistry at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.
– Dr. LaVerne E. Ragster, senior vice president and provost at UVI on St. Thomas.
Board of Trustees member Yvonne Thraen, who chaired the board's Presidential Search Committee, said in a release distributed by UVI on Friday that the 12-member committee, established last August, received applications from 27 persons, from 23 states and the Virgin Islands. Applicants included former ambassadors and university presidents and current academic vice presidents and deans, with candidates holding doctorates in philosophy, education, medicine and law.
"We were very pleased by the quality and breadth of experience represented by the individuals who applied," Thraen said. "Our national search produced a group of very attractive choices for the Search Committee to consider."
Board of Trustees Chair Auguste E. Rimpel Jr. said in the release that the board's decision to conduct a national search was heavily influenced by advice on "best practices" in such searches received from the National Association of Governing Boards for Colleges and Universities.
The board hired a professional search consultant to review the applications and identify the 10 "most promising" candidates. The Search Committee, "which has broad representation from UVI and the Virgin Islands community," according to the release, then reviewed the 10 applications and narrowed them to six. The committee interviewed those six individuals on Jan. 11 and 12 and based on those interviews recommended the three finalists without ranking them according to preference.
Jennings received an Ed.D. in administration and policy studies from Atlanta University and has served as vice president for development at four southeastern U.S. universities.
Peterson holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University. He began his academic career at South Dakota State University after a substantial business career during which he founded and ran two companies of his own and was vice president for research and development at two major U.S. chemical firms.
Ragster holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at San Diego. Her career at UVI includes more than a decade of teaching and research, in addition to eight years of senior academic leadership and institutional planning responsibilities.
Kean, who in 1990 became the university's third president, formally advised the board last June that he would be retiring effective September 2002, capping an academic career spanning 35 years, all of them at the Virgin Islands institution.
The preceding presidents were Dr. Lawrence C. Wanlass, who served from 1962, when the then-College of the Virgin Islands was chartered, to 1980; and Dr. Arthur A. Richards, from 1980 to 1990.
Kean joined the CVI faculty in 1966, three years after it opened its doors. His teaching field was mathematics. Before being named president, he served as academic dean and then assumed the newly created position of executive vice president. His selection as president came following a nationwide search similar to that currently under way.
One legacy that Kean will leave and another that appears poised to become reality should greatly influence the course of the university under his successor in the years immediately ahead.
First, a new organization and governance structure took effect on Oct. 1, 1999. The provost/chancellor system, as approved by the Board of Trustees, separates campus-level and university-level responsibilities in order to better address the changing needs of each campus, the university as a whole, and the Virgin Islands community. (Further background on the restructuring can be found in this UVI Magazine article.)
Second, the Legislature just last Thursday approved enabling legislation for the establishment of a UVI Research and Technology Park on the St. Croix campus. The measure, which has been sent to Gov. Charles W. Turnbull, a longtime UVI faculty member, authorizes the government to transfer 205 acres of land to UVI for the park and appropriates $1 million to fund operations of the UVI Research and Technology Park Corp. for this fiscal year.
