The College of the Canyons governing board on Wednesday gave the green light for CEO search firms to begin applying to help the college find a permanent leader.
David Andrus has been the interim president of the college since last summer after former Chancellor Dianne Van Hook was removed from office after 36 years in charge — and then she subsequently retired — with no official reason given by Edel Alonso, then president of the governing board, or any of the other sitting board members.
Alonso has stated since then that it was a personnel matter that cannot be discussed publicly due to state laws, but a 20-year audit of facilities contracts was ordered by Andrus and approved by the board in November. Attorneys present at the meeting in which the audit was approved revealed that preliminary findings showed that roughly $12 million may have been misused for more than 700 projects, with a potential for personal gain possible.
A third-party auditing firm was secured to further investigate those findings. An official timeline has not been given for when the audit may be completed, though Andrus has asked for “critical” updates to be provided publicly at governing board meetings.
Andrus, a former political science professor at the college and former president of the COC Academic Senate, has stated that he is open to considering taking up the CEO position full-time.
According to the presentation delivered Wednesday by Eileen O’Hare-Anderson, an attorney with the Liebert, Cassidy, Whitmore law firm, the tentative timeline for selecting a permanent college leader is set to take roughly a year. It is likely to begin in April with the selection of the search firm and finish in the spring or summer of 2026.
“This is a really, really aggressive, very assertive timeline,” O’Hare-Anderson said, but she added that it is typical to want to move quickly.
O’Hare-Anderson said the process is “highly structured and highly regulated,” and the hope is to only have it be conducted once.
“It’s hard enough to go through a CEO search process once,” she said. “You don’t want to have to do it twice in a row. You really only want to do this one time.”
One of the biggest tasks facing the board as it embarks on this process is to update the CEO job description that will be posted in June or July.
“It’s been a long time,” O’Hare-Anderson said. “I don’t know that your job description is necessarily going to be up to date … Think about what the world was like 37 years ago — things have changed. You’re definitely going to want to update your job description, and a job description really, in many, many ways, drives your search.”
Recruitment by the search firm would take place in September, followed by the search committee conducting interviews through December. The finalists for the job would then be presented to the entire governing board in December or January, followed by campus and community forums to provide for stakeholder input.
The governing board would then interview the finalists in February. A final decision is tentatively expected by March 2026.
“After the board makes a final decision, there’s a public announcement,” O’Hare-Anderson said. “That’s usually a big ‘Yay team’ kind of moment. There’s an excitement. People are excited to get a new CEO. And then there is the contract negotiation, which is less exciting and less fun. The board approves the contract in open session at a regular meeting, and then transition (takes place).”
Both Andrus and O’Hare-Anderson agreed that much of the timeline will be based on how quickly a search firm can be selected and the job can be posted, but once those things happen, everything else should fall into place.
“To me, the aggressiveness is frontloaded, and the rest of it doesn’t seem aggressive,” Andrus said. “But there’s also some time in here where we can make some space up.”
There was no discussion among the board members before unanimously voting in favor of retaining a search firm.
