UGA Provost Whitten not going to Iowa State

University of Georgia Provost Pamela Whitten won’t be leaving for Iowa State University.

Whitten was one of three finalists for the Iowa State presidency, but the Iowa Board of Regents picked an inside candidate to become the school’s first female president.

The board deliberated for nearly two hours after interviewing Whitten and the other two finalists Monday morning, the Des Moines Register reported.

Wendy Wintersteen, 61, was their choice for the job, at a first-year salary of $525,000 plus $125,000 in deferred compensation. Wintersteen has worked at Iowa State for nearly 40 years, and since 2006 has been dean of its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The third finalist was Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the federal National Institute of Food and Agriculture. All three had previously visited the campus to meet with faculty, administrators, students and alumni.

A fourth finalist dropped out before his or her name was publicly announced.

Iowa State, with about 37,000 students, is one of the nation’s most prominent universities in agricultural research.

Whitten has now been in two presidential searches in the space of about a year.

In 2016, she was a candidate to become chancellor at the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus,

Whitten came to UGA in 2014, named by UGA President Jere Morehead to succeed him as UGA’s second-highest administrator. Prior to coming to UGA, Whitten was dean of Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences.

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