UvA is looking for a new Geert ten Dam
President of the Executive Board Geert ten Dam is entering the final six months of her presidency at the UvA. On 1 June – exactly eight years after she took office – her second and final term as president of the Board will come to an end. Her succession has now been initiated. An advertisement will be placed in the near future.
The draft job profile for the new college president - in the hands of Folia - has now received a positive recommendation from the UvA’s central works council and central student council. The profile shows that the UvA is looking for a president that Geert ten Dam (65) could apply for in no time, were it not for the fact that she will leave on 1 June.
Her successor must obviously have a strong academic background, but also be ‘an inspiring and connecting leader, a goal-oriented and democratic administrator and team player’, according to the job profile. The new president is aware of being an employer ‘of a large and diverse institution, has an eye for binding talent and managing workload, and encourages staff - and students - to continuous improvement and self-reflection’.
Governance style
Moreover, the new president - like the current one - has ‘social safety and non-violence as high priorities’, the new president ‘guards against abuse of power inequality and has a clear vision of the role of, and demonstrable affinity with, co-determination’. The new UvA boss must further ‘be visible and approachable to students and staff’ and has a ‘transparent, consensus-oriented governance style’. Once decisions have been taken, the new president ‘actively carries them out in broad, open communication’. In short, the UvA is looking for a new president who is much like the current one.
Application committee
What Ten Dam’s succession procedure will look like is now broadly known. The Supervisory Board has put together a representative application committee that has prepared the job profile. The committee consists of delegates from the Central Student Council, the Central Works Council, the Supervisory Board, the Executive Board and the deans and is chaired by Marise Voskens, president of the Supervisory Board (she will also step down herself on 1 September 2024). During the application process, the committee will be assisted by an executive search agency, a company specialised in searching and finding the right top executives.
Egon Zehnder
In 2016, when Ten Dam herself was recruited (as well as her later colleague, Rector Karen Maex), the procedure was supervised externally by headhunter and executive search agency Egon Zehnder. The job interviews took place at this agency’s offices in the Zuidas, but this did not turn out to be a safe and discrete environment: a detailed atmospheric report of the interviews was published shortly afterwards in the Dutch daily NRC, including the names of Maex and Ten Dam as well as those of the rejected candidates. The then Supervisory Board led by the late Atzo Nicolaï went off like a sore thumb and was furious. It is therefore unlikely that Egon Zehnder will supervise the procedure. Which agency will take on the supervision is not yet known, but the UvA works extensively with the Holtrop Ravesloot agency.
1 June
Ten Dam’s second and final term will end, as mentioned, on 1 June 2024. The Supervisory Board assumes that her successor will also take office at that time and can then use the entire summer for a familiarisation process, before the new academic year starts on 1 September with a new president. An official and formal farewell to Geert ten Dam is also expected at that time.
