Chodorow nixes campaign for top Tulane post

Stanley Chodorow will focus on earning the presidency at UT-Austin. Provost Stanley Chodorow withdrew his candidacy for the presidency of Tulane University yesterday, following interviews last week at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a finalist for the top post. Chodorow's visit to UT-Austin, where he participated in a two-day round of open interviews with the entire campus community, led him to decide that UT-Austin is "just a better match" for him. "I had a good visit to Austin and have withdrawn from the Tulane search," Chodorow said. "I came to the conclusion that my experience at Penn and [University of California at San Diego] is more [appropriate] to the opportunity at Texas than to the one at Tulane." The UT-Austin search will wrap up December 16, when the Board of Regents makes its final selection. One finalist -- Larry Faulkner, the provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- has yet to visit the campus. Chodorow announced October 31 that he would resign as Penn's provost at the end of the year. That announcement came in conjunction with the news that UT-Austin had selected him as one of five finalists for its top post. He will return to the UT-Austin campus next week for a final round of interviews with the Board of Regents. Unlike the Texas search, where state law requires that the names of candidates be publicly announced, the Tulane search is strictly confidential. Only the final choice of its president will be officially announced, Tulane search committee Chairperson Cathy Pearson said last week. But last week, a member of the Tulane search committee confirmed that Chodorow was one of two finalists for the open position. And Tulane's Board of Administrators planned to make a final decision on the school's next president by the end of this week. In light of Chodorow's withdrawal, Pearson refused to comment about whether the other candidate in the Tulane search will receive the appointment, or on when a final decision would be made. Chodorow's preference for UT-Austin rather than Tulane is reasonable given the relative size and prestige of the two schools, Education Professor Peter Kuriloff said. "Texas is one of the top universities in the whole country," Kuriloff said. "If you're going to be a president, you might as well be a president at one of the top places -- but Tulane ain't bad." Kuriloff added that in a presidential search, a candidate's decision of whether or not to pursue a certain school is based on a "very complicated calculus." "Who gets chosen has to do with a lot of factors and is so much a function of chance," he said. "Once you get into the final five or final three it has so much to do with a whole set of circumstances, including the intention of the candidate." Tulane Student Body President and search committee member Jeremy Shaffer also said he understands Chodorow's decision to withdraw as a finalist. "If he is more interested in UT-Austin than Tulane, it makes more sense for him to pursue things there," he said. Shaffer added that although the Tulane search committee had intended to make a decision by the end of this week, it is not "in any super rush" to make a final selection. "Our acting president isn't leaving until the end of our academic year," he said. "That gives us a lot of flexibility. We're looking for the best possible candidate and will do what it takes to get that person." Shaffer would not comment about the other candidate for the Tulane presidency. In previous presidential searches last year, Chodorow was passed over for positions at the University of Michigan, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Arizona.

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