Anybody know anything about her? Does she like sports? Odds she could explain a pick and roll? Think it really even matters if she is a basketball fan?
Pamela Whitten
- Thread starter Cavanagh.13
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I don't think it matters if she's a fan, but I do think it matters if she believes a winning basketball and football program helps the university as a whole.
I read that while at KSU, she regularly attended sporting events and even requested halftime stat sheets when attending football games.
Wow....looks like an underwhelming hire. And I don't think you want to see that 2 piece, She's a handsome woman.
Underwhelming may not be a bad thing in this instance. Holds degrees from Kansas and Kentucky and worked at UGA, all three schools with very powerful athletic departments.
She is a huge sports fan. Will be great for the Athletic Department.
“The current president, Dr. Pamela Whitten, also understands the impact athletics has made at KSU. She travels with the football team, and current athletic director Milton Overton always expects her to request a stat sheet to peruse at halftime.”
“The current president, Dr. Pamela Whitten, also understands the impact athletics has made at KSU. She travels with the football team, and current athletic director Milton Overton always expects her to request a stat sheet to peruse at halftime.”
Pamela Whitten to leave Kennesaw State; named President of Indiana University
Pamela Whitten has announced that she will be stepping down as president of Kennesaw State University and has accepted the position of president of Indiana University, effective July 1, 2021.
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I bet she does... saucy Minx!“The current president, Dr. Pamela Whitten, also understands the impact athletics has made at KSU. She travels with the football team, and current athletic director Milton Overton always expects her to request a stat sheet to peruse at halftime.”
Holds degrees from??? Her last job was Kennesaw State! When was the last time you thought to yourself "if only IU could be more like Kennesaw State?" in anything? That's Strange with a capital S.
Come to think of it, maybe Myles Brand, Adam Herbert, and Mike McRobbie were.Maybe she is a undercover UK operative, seeking to destroy IU athletics!!
Huh?
There's nothing the least bit unusual about an academic administrator going from a smaller institution to a larger one. Usually it means they've earned a great reputation in that world.
Heck, Purdue's president had never been an administrator at any college at any level. And I'd say he's done pretty well -- figuring out how to keep tuition rates flat for nearly a decade at a major institution, without tanking the university's finances, is almost unbelievable.
I don't know anything about her academia background (other than degrees listed) or what she accomplished in the workforce prior to being hired at Indiana, but from an athletic department standpoint, it may not be a terrible thing to have a president passionate about sports, especially one who has studied and worked at universities with strong athletic departments previously. Just a thought. More TIC response than anything.
Mitch Daniels had been Governor, and had legs as a Preidential or VP candidate.. can't remember which. I guess i missed where she'd been Governor!
When was the last time IU had a president travel with a team or asked for stats? Sounds good to me.
Yeah, I get that. My point is that it's myopic to judge a university president simply by your own biases about their past work experience.
The fact that she comes from Kennesaw State -- instead of, say, Vanderbilt or somewhere like that -- tells us absolutely nothing. You have to have some faith in the Trustees, the search subcommittee, the professionals they hired to find and vet candidates, etc. to have done their due diligence and made the best selection.
Yes, good for the AD....I was thinking more about the U as a whole.
Seems like it. Underwhelming. I will say I didn't know Kennesaw State had an enrollment of 41,000.. Also, maybe an absence of Ivy League degrees means she has some common sense.
She may be great; hope she is, but I still think it's unusual, and I'd be the first to admit I know little about the typical background for such a candidate, other than I'd generally expect them to have experience with large state universities... ie. one of the largest in their state.
Kennesaw St to me is more of commuter/online school, seems strange and the fact that you offered such a silly comparison for PU, makes me know you understand exactly what I'm saying. Hopefully she is innovative, but I still believe it's an unusual jump to the largest public university in a state.
Yes, unless they did a Biden and refused to consider 50% of the population.
On the surface, she doesn’t appear to be a globalist so that right there may be a breath of fresh air.
Lol. KSU is not commuter school anymore. It’s closer to a PUFW. They have pretty nice facilities from what I can see.
When I first saw the Kennesaw reference, I paused too. After a little more reading, I saw that she was there briefly, as President (with a solid track record of institutional improvement during that time), but prior that was Provost at UGA and rose up through the ranks to Dean at Michigan State. That’s a solid background. Also, according to the googles, when she was hired at KSU she said she wanted to “lead KSU with dominating athletics.”
Just in terms of size, Kennesaw is the 2nd largest university in Georgia with around 41,000 students.
My takeaway is she would’ve fired Archie at halftime of his first game against Indiana State.
You mean if they set out to hire a woman, come hell or high water?
Well, if they did that, that would be unfortunate. That’s not an antidote to the problem those actions are ostensibly trying to fix, it’s just flipping the coin.
I was not aware of that.
It goes to show how sometimes we have misconceptions. If you were to ask 100 people to (without Google or anything) name the college/university campus with the largest student body, I bet most people would guess OSU or Texas A&M or somewhere like that.
Nope. University of Central Florida with some 72,000 students is the largest in the country.
She's our new president. I like it. Can't imagine her goal is to suck in sports at a power 5 school. We'll be fine.
Go Hoosiers!
Go Hoosiers!
It seems like a really odd pick to me. I'm not sure what a "telemedicine expert" does to enhance IU's image as academic institution. Most of us have probably experienced it in the last year and my novice opinion of it is have your staff pick up the F-N phone. Just spent more than an hour waiting on hold with IU health before giving up, just need a damn prescription refill my Dr. has to authorize. Shit, if she could fix their horrible patient service, I could care less what she knows about sports
Mcrobbie didn’t care in the least if we sucked, that was a problem IMO.
I think wise university administrators would recognize that, while intercollegiate athletics may not be the core of university’s mission, it’s still a very vital part of the fabric upon which a university community resides.
I do think it’s possible to err on either side of that. But it seems like it’s more common in recent years to see them err (as Myles Brand famously did...and then bizarrely parlayed that philosophy into a presidency of the NCAA itself) on the side of devaluing athletics.
I get that they don’t want their educational institutions to be seen as a factory for elite sports. But there’s a proper balance there — many schools have demonstrated that having successful athletics programs can be a great help to achieving their academic goals.
Underwhelming? Based on what exactly?
how many interviews did you sit in on? How well do you know her?
Don’t go all ordfan on us.
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