St. Thomas President Julie Sullivan announced March 1 she’d be stepping down from her position, putting School of Law Dean Rob Vischer into the interim president role starting June 1 and igniting a nationwide search for a new head of the university.
While St. Thomas’ board of trustees will begin a private search that is expected to take an entire academic year, Vischer will step into Sullivan’s role of leading the university; the dean, who has been at St. Thomas for 17 years, said he is excited to be a part of the transition.
“It’s a tremendous honor and tremendous affirmation to be trusted with this role for this transition period,” Vischer said. “I really believe that the mission of St. Thomas is needed in the world now more than ever, so the opportunity to help lead the institution forward, it’s a blessing to be put in that position.”
Vischer has served as a professor, associate dean and dean at the law school. He said his reaction to Sullivan’s departure was bittersweet.
“President Sullivan has been a transformative leader for the university and, like everybody else, I was hoping that we would be able to hold on to her until she was ready to retire,” Vischer said. “I’ve always had a good working relationship with President Sullivan and we’re going to spend a lot more time together over the next three months so I am up to speed on some of the issues that I haven’t spent much time with because of my current role.”
The decision to select Vischer as the interim president fell on the board of trustees, who held a meeting discussing the topic as soon as Sullivan told them she would be stepping down.
“They discussed possibilities at the board meeting, and then unanimously chose Rob,” the president’s chief of staff Amy McDonough said. “One year before Julie came as president, he started as Dean of the Law School. And during that time, he’s kind of known among the Deans as a leader among Deans.”
As the academic year comes to a close and Sullivan’s exit nears, Vischer will look to gain more knowledge of St. Thomas’ 2025 Strategic Plan, which he called his “playbook” for his time as interim president. Vischer will focus on the priorities of the plan that include the new STEAM building and growing the Morrison Family College of Health.
“What we can’t do is say, ‘Well, it’s an interim year, so we’re just going to pause until there’s a permanent (president),’” Vischer said. “The strategic priorities that the university has identified and is pursuing, we have to keep making progress on those. There’s too much going on.”
While a lot is happening at St. Thomas, which will complete its first Division I athletics season at the end of the academic year, Vischer is confident in the team Sullivan has built around her.
“She has helped put together a stellar team of leaders at the university. We’ve got a really deep pool of talented, experienced and mission-committed leaders,” Vischer said. “I don’t need to come in and say, ‘All right, I’ve got everything figured out’… I’m going to be a partner with the folks who are already doing great work in every area of the university.”
McDonough said Vischer will be a welcome addition to the team.
“(Vischer) will be really great to work with and I think students will really like getting to know him,” McDonough said. “He’s one of those leaders that’s been involved in a lot of things outside the law school as a representative for the whole university.”
Vischer said he looks forward to getting to know the students and making it a priority in his work.
“The highlight of my position… is getting to know students and understanding where you’re coming from and how you’re hoping to use your gifts to touch lives in our world,” Vischer, who teaches “about half” of St. Thomas’ law students, said. “This is a learning community and you have to be in relationship with students to understand where the students are coming from and where the university, in response, needs to go.”
Connecting with students isn’t just something that Vischer talks about, he is known around the community for it.
“He’s really an inspirational leader. He’s known as someone who has worked really closely with students as law school dean,” McDonough said.
While Vischer will look to foster a sense of community with students, the St. Thomas board of trustees will be searching for someone to fill Sullivan’s role.
“While (Vischer is) interim president, there’ll be a national search for a new president. So that kind of happens over the same year,” McDonough said. “Our board bylaws actually outline the process of hiring a new president, and that’s one of the responsibilities of the trustees. They’ve already started thinking about it.”
The board will put together a search committee that is made up of board members as well as St. Thomas community members. McDonough said the coming months will be a time to hear from the community on what it wants out of the next president.
“The plan is to do a lot of consultation at the beginning,” McDonough said. “There’ll be opportunities for students to weigh in, for faculty and staff to weigh in, about what they want from a new president.”
The search committee will bring what it hears in meetings and surveys with the community to a firm that helps universities select a president and build a profile for St. Thomas’ new leader.
“That profile will be developed, and then it will be open to the world that we’re still looking for a new president, and then candidates will start coming in,” McDonough said.
The process of finding and interviewing candidates will be much more private than the hiring of a dean, according to McDonough.
“The presidential candidates don’t come on campus and have forums the way the deans do, because they have to keep it confidential,” McDonough said.
Vischer admitted losing Sullivan will be hard but said he’s confident in the team at St. Thomas.
“We’re losing a wonderful leader, but we have hundreds of folks who are working hard every day and investing their gifts in the well-being of our students and the broader community,” Vischer said. “I’m hoping that we don’t skip a beat.”
Scout Mason can be reached at maso7275@stthomas.edu.