The members of the Presidential Search Committee were announced in an email to the University on Tuesday. The 14-person panel will include nine trustees, four faculty members and one student representative.

The committee will search for the ninth University president after current University President Frederick Lawrence announced his resignation on Jan. 30. Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Lisa Lynch will serve as an interim president next year while the committee searches for candidates.

Larry Kanarek ’76 will serve as chairman of the search committee. A former senior director of McKinsey & Company, Kanarek was chosen in early March to chair the committee by Chair of the Board of Trustees Perry Traquina ’78.

The University will also be “utilizing the expertise of one of the world’s leading research consulting firms, Spencer Stuart,” according to the email from the Office of Communications. Spencer Stuart’s Education, Nonprofit & Government Practice has completed 800 searches for chief executive officers, chairmen and presidents in the past five years, according to its website. Spencer Stuart has also created an email account to which students and community members can send presidential nominations or other input, brandeispres@spencerstuart.com.

Trustees on the board will include Traquina; Vice Chair of the Board and CEO and founder of the Davis Companies Jon Davis ’75; Dean of Harvard Medical School Jeff Flier, parent of ’00, parent of ’11; former senior vice president of marketing for AutoZone Lisa Kranc ’75; chief executive of Berkshire Property Advisors George Krupp, whose wife Lizbeth is the Chair of the Rose Art Museum’s Board of Advisors; Vice chair of the Mandel foundation Barbara Mandel; senior managing director of Guggenheim Securities Adam Rifkin ’97; community activist and former non-profit and education management consultant Cindy Shapira; and immediate past president and former CEO of Dechert LLP Bart Winokur, honorary degree ’01.

The faculty representatives will include Profs. Stuart Altman (Heller), Wendy Cadge (SOC, WGS), Robin Feuer Miller (RECS, COML), and Sacha Nelson (BIOL). Altman is an economist with a focus in healthcare policy and Medicare, according to the Heller School website. Cadge studies religion and its intersections with healthcare, immigration and sexuality in the United States, according to her profile in the Brandeis faculty guide. Miller is the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and studies and teaches about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Dickens. Nelson researches cell types and circuits in the mammalian neocortex. All of the professors were nominated and by the Faculty Senate.

The student representative to the committee will be Sneha Walia ’15, the outgoing student union president. According to a March 24 Justice article, Walia stated that she was appointed by Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel.

Last Thursday, Kanarek, Traquina, Mandel and Miller appeared at a student forum in the Shapiro Admissions Center to hear student input on the search for the next University president. Also present were Chuck Jordan—a representative of Spencer Stuart, the consulting firm which will be leading the presidential search—Walia.

About 30 students attended the forum, many of whom were Student Union members or leaders of prominent campus clubs. Kanarek began the forum by explaining the presidential search process and what the committee hopes to accomplish. While the specific information about selected candidates and their resumes cannot be shared with the community, Kanarek said that the committee hopes to make the search an “open, transparent process” and update the community as much as possible.

As the floor opened for discussion, many students expressed their desire for increased social justice efforts and diversity on campus. Citing what she described as the “shutting down of Black Lives Matter activity” on campus earlier this year, one student said that she believes the University has “quite a leap to make in terms of these issues,” detailing the feel of “racial segregation in academic and social spaces on campus." She said that the new president should be someone who not only has training or background in these issues, but also explicitly shows he or she supports diversity on campus.

A second student agreed that the University needs to engage more with the idea of social justice. “We need to have a president who is willing to engage with the community … and talk about what social justice means,” the student said. In particular, the student stressed the desire that the president be open to speaking directly with students. Another student pointed out that Brandeis should increase the diversity of its funding and donors as well as increasing diversity on campus.

Charlotte Franco ’15 said her ideal vision for the University is that it needs to be proactive instead of reactive to issues that arise. “Brandeis should be at the forefront of change … we shouldn’t be afraid to do new and different things,” Franco said. According to her, the president should not be afraid to take action and be “willing to take those risks.”

Risa Dunbar ’17 said that the University “should be able to begin things and not just respond to things” when under public scrutiny. In particular, Dunbar brought up the Al-Quds Student Dialogue Initiative, which she is part of, and the group’s struggle to discuss its beliefs with the president himself. Dunbar said she and many members of the community want a president who will listen to student voices and is willing to “have a conversation.”

Another student addressed University donors. “I feel like there’s a disconnect between how donors and alumni perceive the school and how students perceive the school,” she said. Citing issues such as the Ayaan Hirsi Ali controversy last spring, the student said the University’s next president should be someone who can “bridge this disconnect” and communicate between students and the outside world to get the ideal results.

Other students addressed the desire for the president to embrace the Jewish roots of the school, with one student saying that “we cannot lose sight” of the fact that Brandeis was a “place for Jews to go who were not allowed to go to other institutes of higher education.” Emily Conrad ’17 added that while the University’s Jewish roots are important and do need to be embraced, other aspects of the school’s diversity should be embraced equally alongside this. “These two aspects don’t need to be divergent,” Conrad said. “We need a candidate that really understands both.”

Franco also discussed the need to increase access to higher education through scholarships and financial aid. Franco said that as a University founded on the principal of open access, we need to make sure we are upholding that same principle today for those who do not have easy access to higher education. Franco said that we need to not only “do the most we can do to reach out to those students”, but to make sure their “stories are heard” as well.