From reading the article in The Post, based on their backgrounds , none of the candidates seem like they'll be a big supporter, let alone an advocate for athletics.

From reading their bio's on their current school's web site, my preference, not that it matters, would be Mr. Mukherjee.

Guy has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
That's the toughest of all Engineering degrees.

Also can't believe O.U. limits the Open Forum for each candidate to 1 hour.

So any reports from the first forum? I wasn't able to go and did not have OU credentials to watch.

Not what I asked. Did anyone actually attend the first forum and get a feel for the candidate?

Disagree on the Louisville gal. She would be my second choice. Guy from Marshall still first choice. Ball State lady a distant third, IMHO. I think she'd be kind of clone of our AD and more into platitudes than actual problem solving and advancing the institution. She's the one, I think, who would be more of the Nellis type hire -- says the right things but is very shallow and doesn't really look into issues in depth.

Ball State, Marshall, and Louisville - Absolutely disgusting.

We have no respect for ourselves.

Curious how you've reached the conclusion about platitudes vs. problem solving. Something she said in the forum? Or do you have prior knowledge of her and her work?

Well, we've had a mixed bag from the Harvard and the Ivy League IMHO:

John C. Baker (1945–1961), excellent
Vernon R. Alden (1962–1969), mediocre at best

And, one other president with a prestige school and Ivy League background -- Herman Gerlach James (1935-43) -- was also probably one of our better presidents. James held a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Columbia.

It was James who reorganized the university into something resembling its modern form. When he assumed the presidency there were only two colleges -- Liberal Arts and Education. Under Liberal Arts all sorts of disciplines were covered from engineering to economics to languages, fine arts and philosophy. From this mess he created: the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Applied Sciences (now College of Engineering), the College of Commerce (now College of Business), and the College of Fine Arts. He then took the departments of English, history, mathematics and music as well as other duplicate areas out of the College of Education and put them into one of the new academic colleges.

But, Alston Ellis (1901-1921), another of our finest presidents, was a graduate of a place we don't normally look to for leadership. Ellis secured legislative funding for the university and defeated a proposal to fund only O$U for regular college studies and then only the normal schools at Ohio and Miami. This was called the Lybarger Bill, introduced by a legislator from Coshocton. Where did Ellis receive his undergraduate and part of his graduate education? Of all places, it was That School in Oxford, and I'm not talking England here. He also had graduate and law degrees from O$U and Wooster.

The point of this history lesson? Good university leadership can come from all sorts of places -- from the Ivy league to the backwaters of Butler County. Let's emphasize the person and their leadership qualities and not the school name on their diplomas.

[Note: James was accused by some faculty of being a Nazi sympathizer, though there's little actual evidence of this, and he was the president who started the ROTC program on campus, which was widely criticized at the time.]

Vern Alden was pretty bad. He let Miami play him like a stooge, and at the end of the day, Ohio ended up locked into mandatory open admissions like everyone else except Miami. Gross strategic error on what was probably the most significant issue of his tenure.

Ball State comes in at an impressive #212.....

We are the Village Idiots. Absolutely no standards. Who was running the Search Committee - Swank and Wannamaker?

Please tell me what great things Alden did. Particularly the ones that are so great that they make up for his epic mishandling of the selective admissions issue. And don't say that he grew enrollment. He was President in the era when the baby boom wave graduated high school and the era of college deferments from Vietnam. An inflatable sex doll could have sat in his chair in the 60s and grown enrollment.

100%

I get the impulse to recruit away from Ivies and agree that neither Marshall, Ball State, not Louisville seem like schools to emulate.

But I think the fact that OUs President makes ~450k makes recruiting from the Ivies a tall task. For reference, Harvard's President makes ~$1.1m year. Princeton's President makes $945k. And I understand it, that's pre-bonus and incentive comp. Columbia's president had all in comp of 3.3m in a single year (2012). I suspect you have to go pretty far down the org chart at places like that to get to OU President level comp wise.

I'm not gonna pretend to know the ins and outs of the higher education labor market, but I do wonder how attractive this job is for a talented administrator who is progressing at an elite institution.