With summer break only a few weeks away, UW-Madison officials are putting a pause on their search for a new dean of students until next year.
We simply cannot conduct final interviews and choose a chief student-affairs officer without students on campus,\ said UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell, in a statement released Thursday.
Members of the ""search-and-screen"" committee in charge of selecting candidates for dean of students made the decision to delay the process when they realized that they would not have a final list of candidates before summer began.
""We didn't see any way we could get all the way to the end of the process before finals, and we decided we wouldn't try,"" said David Nelson, a professor of biochemistry at UW-Madison and chair of the committee.
Nelson said that the search for a new dean only began in March, when the committee finally received enough applications to formally begin its efforts. Each step in the process since then took longer than expected, he said.
""We probably underestimated how long it would take by a couple of weeks, and those are the critical weeks that we don't have now,"" Nelson said.
Katrina Flores, one of several UW-Madison students on the search-and-screen committee, said that waiting until next year will give students an opportunity to evaluate the candidates for a position that is very important to them.
""Students will actually have an open forum where they can meet and greet applicants, and they can rate them, and they can turn in that information to whoever is going to make the decision,"" Flores said.
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