Search for Aurora College president begins with GNWT-only job ad

The search to find the next Aurora College president is beginning with a hiring competition restricted to existing NWT government staff.

Glenda Vardy Dell, the current president, will retire in the next 12 months, a spokesperson for the college said. The college hopes to hire someone who can work through a transitional period before assuming the role of president in the fall of 2024.

Joe Handley, the former NWT premier who chairs Aurora College’s new board of governors, said the decision to limit the competition to territorial government staff was taken at board level.

Handley said internal competitions and attempts to give existing employees the first opportunity were not unusual in government. If no suitable candidate is found, he said, the search will expand.

“If we get any indication of interest then of course, we would look at trying to fill the position with a northern person,” Handley said.

“We’re in the business of training northerners for jobs.

“If we don’t get qualified people from the North, we’ll have to look farther afield.”

The advertisement for the role was posted near the end of November and closes on Friday this week, December 8. Handley said he understood two weeks to be the standard duration for an ad of this nature.

The president must run a college with an annual operating budget of $54 million that is busy transforming itself into a polytechnic university, a project that forms a pillar of the NWT’s plan to revitalize its education sector.

In return, the advertisement promises an annual salary of $193,000 to $241,000 plus a northern allowance.

The president will be hired to a five-year term, the advertisement states. It does not specify a home campus at which the president must be based. In the past, then-Thebacha MLA Frieda Martselos had expressed concern that the president basing themselves in a location other than Fort Smith signalled an erosion of the town’s role as the college’s headquarters.

The Department of Education, Culture and Employment said the college now operates at arm’s length from the GNWT and the college board has been handed full responsibility for appointment and supervision of a president.

However, the hiring process is still run through the GNWT’s website and resources. The Department of Finance, which has responsibility for NWT government human resources, did not respond to a request for comment.

When the college’s transformation into a polytechnic university was first announced, the NWT government of the time launched what it said was a nationwide search for a president who would also take on responsibility for leading that broader project.

“We are looking for the best. We are looking for a different leader, someone who has the knowledge and ability to run an accredited university,” Caroline Cochrane, then the education minister, said at the time.

Tom Weegar was appointed president some five months later. He lasted a year in the role before being sacked, saying he had encountered “resistance to change.” (Weegar said last week he would begin a series of columns in NNSL’s newspapers.)

Handley said running an internal competition should be seen as a first step in what may turn out to be a longer process.

“We have lots of time,” he said.