Everyone wants to know who the next chancellor will be, but with the search committee bound by nondisclosure agreements and many candidates not publicly speaking about their interest, it’s hard for the university community to know what’s going on.
Gerard Gibert is changing that: he has spoken openly about wanting the position. He’s the first candidate to openly campaign for the job.
Gibert, the founder of Venture Technologies and current vice chairman of the Mississippi Lottery Board, is not the candidate that would normally apply for the position. He has little experience in academia and holds only a bachelor’s degree.
He said that unifying the community would be his first priority, if he were to get the job.
“I think the first thing I would do is to find our identity,” he said.
Gibert believes that new names on buildings should not be a part of that identity, even though some are named after individuals that created legacies of racism and violence in Mississippi.
“Let’s see if we can figure out a way to get on board with things we should all be concerned about, such as academic excellence,” Gibert said concerning his plan on handling controversial academic building names. “That was really the point: that, golly, the product that comes out of those buildings is way more important, in my view, than the name affixed to the outside of them.”
When it comes to the Confederate monument, Gibert doesn’t believe the chancellor should make a decision.
“I don’t think such power should be conferred to any individual, such as a chancellor, on anything that’s this significant and this major, that those are decisions that need to be made by multiple stakeholders,” he said. “I think the student senate and the faculty senate are key stakeholders in that and should have a voice in that, but (it) seems to me that there are a number of other stakeholders as well in what goes on at the university.”
Other stakeholders that most agree should have a say in the decision include alumni, financial contributors, past members of the student and faculty senate, past faculty members, the legislature, the Mississippi’s government and residents in the state.
“I think it would be the chancellor’s job to take that resolution to these factions, and discuss it and have them weigh in on it as well,” he said. “I think it’s more about facilitating rather than influence.”
Gibert launched a website with the information from a document that was sent to the chancellor search committee to campaign publicly.
“No institution has a greater obligation to bury deep, and face down, the last vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow,” he said in the document, under the header of “free expression.”
Gibert believes that the chancellor should not make many unilateral changes and should instead drive organic change within the university. He takes the same view in fostering academic excellence.
In the document sent to the search committee, Gibert wrote that “the chancellor must restore academic excellence.” He said that in recent years, the university has fallen down in some academic areas, though he could not point to a particular cause.
His solution, he said, may be a “blue ribbon team,” which would measure performance in academic departments on campus. A blue ribbon team would also be responsible for “proposing ideas and concepts that make sense to ensure that we do stay at the forefront,” he said.
Gibert also said that because he believes the industry of higher education is on the verge of major disruption, resources would likely be concentrated in some academic programs and routed away from others. Interim Chancellor Larry Sparks made a similar assertion in an interview in June.
“I think traditional education is where one just goes off to school and lives in a dorm and goes to various classes in brick and mortar buildings in a in a small amount of acreage; I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be what the future of higher education looks like,” Gibert said.
It’s not just academics that are important in Gibert’s vision for the university. He believes academics and athletics should be seen as having equal importance by the Lyceum.
“Should (athletics) receive any more or less focus than research and academics? No, I don’t believe that,” he said.
Gibert said that the university should look to the University of Alabama for an understanding of how sports can improve not just a university, but a state as well.
Though he wouldn’t discuss any plans he had for the position of athletic director, Gibert said that Interim Athletic Director Keith Carter should be given every consideration for the permanent position.
Gibert also sees potential disruption in university sports, saying that in the future, athletics at the collegiate level may be franchised by universities.
“It would still be just what we’re used to today,” he said. “We host games on campus, and there would be facilities, but maybe there would be private organizations that operate that.”
Gibert said he wouldn’t pursue that change, but he would “discuss it with peers.”
He said that he thinks about the university as an entrepreneur, looking for unique solutions to problems and to sell the university as a product to prospective students and interested parties in the state. His entrepreneurial work is nearly the only reference he has for working as a leader, so even issues like diversity are understood by Gibert through a business mindset.
He touted the diversity of Venture Technologies while he worked there, saying they focused on qualifications in the hiring process, not race. He said that private companies have a right to hire the people that they want, whether that group is diverse or not.
“It just worked out,” he said. “We didn’t have to press deliberately to make that happen.”
At the university, though, he said that race and ethnicity could be factors in hiring.
“In a public setting, I don’t think it’s safe to say I wouldn’t look at (race) at all,” he said. “I do think public institutions should very closely aligned with the composition of the state.”
Gibert said he is very interested in the state’s role in the university, saying that he sees the chancellor as someone that should be “coalescing” with corporate and political leaders, healthcare experts and ethicists, and, “to some degree,” activists.
The Campus Search Advisory Committee listening sessions will begin at 9 a.m. at The Inn at Ole Miss on Thursday, Sept. 5.
