Candidate for the open CAS Executive Director position, Virginia Geer-Mentry (pictured above), spoke at an open forum at Food Studio North on Wednesday Feb. 27. The search has been narrowed down to three candidates (Udeshi Seneviratne/photo editor).
Campus Auxiliary Services is nearing the end of the process to hire a new executive director. After a national search to fill the position, the pool has been narrowed down to three candidates who most align with the college’s vision and ideals.
The CAS Executive Director position oversees the nine dining facilities on campus, laundry services in residence halls and the Big Tree Inn, among other duties. Assistant Provost for Finance and Facilities Enrico Johnson is president of the Board of Directors that oversees CAS and gave an overview of the kind of candidate the search committee is looking for.
“We’re looking for the total package,” Johnson said. “We want somebody who can provide leadership and vision for CAS. We want somebody who will work collaboratively with other campus officers. A person who will not only seek to achieve the expectations of the customers but to exceed them.”
This search to find the total package began after Mark Scott, the former executive director, left the position in the summer of 2018. Scott had been promoted to the Vice President of Finance and Administration in May 2018 before deciding to leave Geneseo altogether shortly after.
Over the 12 years Scott spent in the executive director role, CAS experienced financial growth and significant improvements in many areas, according to Vice President for Student Life Robert Bonfiglio.
“The general consensus among the staff is that CAS was managed well under Mark,” Bonfiglio said. “Whoever is hired won’t be coming into a total makeover kind of situation. Just more of a fine tuning of the program.”
The call for applicants to the executive director position originally yielded roughly 40 responses, according to Bonfiglio. From there, 10 were offered the chance to be interviewed and it was once again cut down to three candidates who were invited to spend a day on campus, see the facilities, meet members of the college community and get a feel for the campus.
“These [candidates] were far and above everybody else,” Johnson said. “We got the three strongest individuals in the pool.”
A part of each candidate’s visit to the college included an open forum which both students and staff were invited to, allowing them to meet the applicants face to face.
Board of director member senior Patrick Kanzler sees the forums as a great opportunity for the search committee to see what students and faculty want as it relates to the executive director position.
“Personally, I’m looking for someone who’s very willing to work with students and understand the concerns of students,” Kanzler said.
Beyond Kanzler and a couple others, the forums have been only sparsely attended by students. Bonfiglio attributes the relatively low attendance numbers to different factors.
“The forum is kind of a tradition at Geneseo,” Bonfiglio said. “Sometimes they’ll be very popular when [students] have burning issues and so one way to interpret this is that there aren’t unusual issues that CAS is dealing with.”
Ideally, members of the board and of the search committee are looking for a candidate who will be at Geneseo for the long run.
“We would want somebody who has some vision to be able to anticipate the needs of various constituents who utilize CAS services,” Johnson said. “Somebody who not only is in touch with what’s going on today but can … give the whole organization some direction.
The third and final candidate visited Geneseo on Wednesday Feb. 27, concluding both the series of visits and open forums. The search committee will now spend the next few weeks reviewing the candidates’ resumes and conducting background checks. They hope to arrive at a decision and hire a new executive director by late spring.
“We have had a number of searches over the last few years and the quality of this pool was particularly high,” Bonfiglio said. “I’m confident going forward that we will have our expectations and needs met for the executive director.”
Managing editor Malachy Dempsey contributed reporting to this article.