Two weeks ago, we noted that an administrator we had never heard of (David Gingerella, the senior director of business operations for science and technology) was seeking the presidency of a school we had never heard of (Florida International University in Miami).
This got us excited. Yale, after all, has quite the track record with grooming future college presidents. There’s Alison Richard at Cambridge, Jared Cohon at Carnegie Mellon, Susan Hockfield at MIT, Dick Brodhead at Duke, Rebecca Chopp at Colgate, Kim Bottomly at Wellesley and, as of next fall, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford.
Alas, Gingerella will not be joining that list. (Or at least not yet.)
Gingerella (whose biography is available here) was not one of 13 candidates whom FIU’s search committee decided to interview for the position. Yesterday, the search committee said it had whittled its list down to three candidates — two FIU insiders and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.