Conversation with John Isaacson ’68, Search Consultant (Q&A)
1 Oct 2008
“Dartmouth has a singular posture in the world of the academy. It is rivaled by a few other small, competitive places that want to ‘do it all,’ prominently, Brown, Princeton, Tufts, and Rice,” says John Isaacson ’68, search consultant. (Photo courtesy John Isaacson ’68)
John Isaacson ’68 is serving as a consultant to Dartmouth’s Presidential Search Committee.
His firm, Isaacson, Miller (IM), based in Boston, recently helped conduct presidential searches for Brown, Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian, and Vanderbilt (learn more about IM’s approach).
A native of Maine, Isaacson graduated Dartmouth, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a law degree from Harvard. He founded his firm in the 1980s after a public service career in Massachusetts, serving three different administrations recruiting cabinet officers and commissioners.
Isaacson and his associate Kate Barry have been working on Dartmouth’s search since the firm’s appointment in May.
Q: Why is Dartmouth’s Leadership Statement so important?
A: Choosing a president is choosing a strategy. Leaders come to colleges and universities from long histories that weave their personal preferences with their institutional experience. When you pick a new leader, you pick a pathway. Dartmouth needs to find and pick a president that fits its own trajectory, that incorporates its rich history and comprehends its future. “The Opportunities for Leadership at Dartmouth” is an effort to present Dartmouth’s singular identity to a few key candidates, so they understand who we are. It acts as well as a template for the search committee, to benchmark the candidates against the challenges that we expect Dartmouth to face. It is a foundational piece. We will refer back to it pretty consistently during the course of the search.
Q: What makes the search for Dartmouth, your alma mater, different?
A: Al Mulley has pushed us and the search committee to delve deeply into the Dartmouth experience and to compare the College to the full range of competitors, from the small liberal arts colleges to the huge private and public research universities. We have come to a clear but simple conclusion. Dartmouth does it all. It’s a small college, an intense community, where senior faculty teach first-term freshmen and where everyone cares about undergraduate life. At the same time, it has three superb professional schools and produces world-class research. Our nearest competitors are small, great universities, but there are very few that look anything like us. A president who comes to Dartmouth should do it all, live the life of a great, small college and compete for faculty with the most research-intensive institutions on earth. We climb a steep path at Dartmouth and we do it very well.
Q: How do you ensure consideration of a diverse pool of candidates?
A: Under the committee’s guidance, we are reaching out broadly across the country, looking for the leadership of all the leading public and private colleges and universities that could reasonably compete with Dartmouth. We want to find the most diverse and most talented pool of candidates that we can possibly find. We are paying special attention to diversity networks and are inquiring broadly. We are eager to find a pool that reflects all of the talent in the country.
Q: What is the competitive landscape, can you name some other schools with current searches?
A: Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins are both squarely in the middle of their searches. Hopkins will probably focus more heavily on technically prepared candidates, but we will talk to some of the same people. We encounter both Hopkins and Northwestern regularly when we are talking to our candidates. Swarthmore is also looking for a president and some portion of our pool might be interested in them. It is always a competitive landscape in presidency searches and that is certainly true today.
Q: What would you tell a prospective candidate about Dartmouth?
A: Almost no one does it like Dartmouth. In size, temperament, and warmth, we are a College, but we are competitive in faculty recruitment, in the quality of our graduate and professional schools with all the great universities. We accentuate community and use the splendor of our location to weave together an intense, caring, ambitious place that can both invent the knowledge of the future and provide a transformational personal experience for our students. We have the ambition to do it all. Our alumni believe in us and contribute. We have built the resources, and unlike virtually everybody else, we can do it. The next president of Dartmouth needs to keep this remarkable place on track.
Q: What do you want alumni and parents of students to know about this undertaking?
A: Dartmouth has a singular posture in the world of the academy. It is rivaled by a few other small, competitive places that want to “do it all,” prominently, Brown, Princeton, Tufts, and Rice. But there are very few with our size and ambition. We have built our unique posture slowly but with deep roots. Virtually every president since Tucker, in the late 19th century, contributed. When you look backwards, the College’s pathway is remarkably clear. The path for the future is the same as it was for every 20th-century president, to do what we do, but do it better.
