UGA Provost Whitten finalist for Iowa State University presidency

University of Georgia Provost Pamela Whitten is one of four finalists for the presidency of Iowa State University.

Whitten is scheduled to visit the Ames campus Tuesday to meet with students, faculty and others.

Iowa State, a public university about the same size as UGA — about 37,000 students — is seeking a replacement for Steven Leath, who left Iowa State to become president of Auburn University.

Whitten is scheduled to appear in a public forum at 4 p.m. Central time that will be live-streamed on the Iowa State University presidential search site, according to that university.

Iowa’s Board of Regents is scheduled to pick Iowa State’s next president Oct. 23 after interviewing candidates and hearing the recommendations of a search committee, according to the Iowa State University website.

So far, only one of the other three finalists has been identified: Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

This is the second time within a year that Whitten has been a finalist to become a large state university’s top administrator. Last year, she was one of the finalists for chancellor of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. The head campus administrators are called chancellors rather than presidents in the University of Tennessee system.

Whitten has been at UGA since 2014, when UGA President Jere Morehead named her to succeed him as UGA’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, the university’s second-ranking administrator after the president, with a base salary of more than $400,000.

As provost, Whitten supervises research and teaching at the university. Most UGA vice presidents and all deans report to her.

Before coming to UGA, Whitten was for five years dean of the Michigan State University College of Communication Arts and Sciences.

Among the accomplishments at UGA Whitten lists in her curriculum vitae are improving UGA’s U.S. News & World Report rankings, as well as hiring five Georgia Research Alliance Scholars since 2014, more than UGA hired in the previous decade. The GRA scholars are highly-paid, established researchers with strong reputations in their fields.

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