The search for the College of The Bahamas’ (COB) new president has now entered the recruitment phase with a Bahamian successor expected to assume the office during the latter half of 2014.

During a news conference Sunday, Chairman of COB’s Council Alfred Sears announced that the recruitment, evaluation and decision processes are expected to extend into early 2014.

The tenure of COB’s current president, Betsy Vogel-Boze will expire at the end of the year.

Only Bahamian citizens are being considered for the position.

“COB is a dynamic and fast-growing, multi-campus institution on the verge of a new era in its evolution, the chairman said. “As you know, the University Transition Secretariat has been working on the road map that will guide the College’s transition to the University of The Bahamas by 2015.

“Therefore, the new president will lead the institution into its new status and will also be the first President of The University of The Bahamas.”

With COB facing a 25 per cent reduction in subventions next year, Mr. Sears said it is important that the suitable candidate be able to form strong private-public sector partnerships in order to build the institution’s endowment.

“We have some of the highest net-worth individuals who live in The Bahamas and have second homes in The Bahamas,” Mr. Sears said. “We also through the research agenda will be able to access multilateral funding from multilateral agencies and foundations from throughout the world and of course, we have to see the intellectual resources of this academy as capital.”

In May the Council appointed a 12-member Advisory Search Committee headed by retired Justice Rubie Nottage, to spearhead the search for a new president.

Mrs. Nottage said that the committee has “comfortable deadlines” for when it expects to complete the remaining phases of the search process.

“All will depend on the size of the pool that we attract because obviously if there aren’t many, we won’t have to stick to these deadlines,” she said. “The step that follows recruitment – the evaluation stage beginning on November 1 and going hopefully until December 1 we want to begin the first phase of our evaluation and that is just looking through what ever the pool is and evaluating them.

“We will eventually get to a second part of that phase and we hope that that will take us through December until mid January 2014 at which time we should have completed our evaluation phase and be at the stage in which we may perhaps propose to Council and then invite to come here on campus, certain of those who have as far as our committee is concerned, satisfied our conditions.”

Dr. Earla Carey-Baines, the current executive vice president of COB, will serve as interim president effective January 1, 2014.

Mrs. Nottage said the deadline for the nomination of candidates is October 24 and prospective candidates have until October 31 to submit applications along with five professional references.

The presidential search process can be followed at a special webpage created on COB’s website at www.cob.edu.bs.