Campus Auxiliary Services (pictured above) is looking to fill the executive director position, after previous title holder Mark Scott announced his leave from the college. Scott left the college in June after he was promoted to the Vice President for Finance and Administration (Udeshi Seneviratne/Photo editor).
Following the departure of long-time Executive Director Mark Scott, Campus Auxiliary Services has begun a process to find a new leader. Current interim executive co-director Pamela Connor predicts that CAS will maintain a similar path.
“From our perspective right now, CAS is a stable organization—we’re fiscally responsible, we have a duty here to campus,” Connor said. “Under Mark’s tenure, we did a lot of things that improved our relationship with the students and with the state, so I wouldn’t expect someone to come in and take us in a completely different direction … of course with all change, there’s more change, but it’s really hard to say ahead of time what exactly will happen.”
Since CAS is a private business, their executive director is chosen by the CAS Board of Directors instead of by the college president, according to CAS Board President and Assistant Provost for Finance and Facilities Enrico Johnson. CAS aims to fill the role by the end of the calendar year, according to Johnson.
The CAS Board will meet for the first time this semester on Oct. 2, where they will plan how to approach the executive director search, according to Connor.
“The Board of Directors will create a search sub-committee and they will begin the search for a new director,” Connor said. “If we need to, we can go to a full-scale search firm or a headhunter.”
Connor and Johnson said that CAS still plans to incorporate elements of the standard process that the college uses to fill major positions.
“We’ll probably mirror some of the state’s approach to recruitment with open forums,” Connor said. “I’m not sure exactly what the mix will be. It would never be that [search] committee making the decision on its own without exposing it to the campus.”
Scott served as CAS executive director since 2007, according to The Livingston County News. In that time, CAS renovated Red Jacket Dining Hall, began a partnership with Barnes and Noble bookstore and opened a convenience store at the Saratoga Terrace among other initiatives.
President Denise Battles announced in a campus-wide email on May 11 that Scott would leave CAS to begin working as Geneseo’s Vice President for Finance and Administration. Battles followed up in a June 6 email to say that Scott would be leaving the Vice President position to work at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas. Scott could not be reached by The Lamron for a comment.
Johnson emphasized that at the early stages in the process, CAS could still choose multiple different paths.
“If we get to the board meeting [in early October] and we feel like the pool of candidates just is not what we think it should be, we can quickly go in a different direction,” Johnson said. “We want to get the best candidate possible. Mark Scott is a hard act to follow, so we have high standards now.”