by Bill Shaner, News Staff

President Joseph Aoun was listed as a potential candidate for the University Of Massachusetts (UMass) presidency position that will open up in June of 2011, as reported in the Boston Globe last Tuesday.

Director of Communications Renata Nyul declined to comment on the length and nature of Aoun’s contract with Northeastern University, saying it’s a “longstanding university policy to not comment on personal information.”
UMass will form a search committee within the next few weeks, Bob Connolley, a spokesman for UMass’s Office of the President, said. He said a candidate will be selected before June 2011, when the current president, Jack Wilson, is slated to step down, but did not give a more specific time frame.

Aoun said he was not interested in the position, The Globe reported.
“The way this works is when a presidency opens up certain names are mentioned by people who don’t even have much say in the decision,” Nyul said. “Sometimes names come up, it’s the same with any big organization.”

The names, including Aoun’s, “surfaced in academic circles,” The Globe reported.

Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor – a position with many of the same responsibilities of a president – of The University of California, Berkely, essentially the college’s president, was quoted in the article saying that UMass will need “visionary leadership from an accomplished academic who will command the respect of the faculty,’’ qualities some at Northeastern attributed to Aoun when he first arrived here in 2006.

Jack Wilson, the current president of UMass, made $546,000 in total compensation for the 2008-2009 year. During the same year, Aoun made $737,863. The 2009-2010 year statistics have not been released.

“[Aoun]’s very excited to continue to work for Northeastern,” Nyul said.

Before he started at Northeastern in 2006, Aoun was the dean of University of Southern California’s (USC) College of Letters, Arts and Sciences for six years.