Adelphi University announced last week that University of Kentucky provost Christine Riordan will become its 10th president and first woman to hold the post in the school’s 118-year history.
Riordan will succeed Robert Scott, who served as the Garden City university’s president since 2000.
“This is a breathtaking moment for me,” Riordan said. “I feel so very privileged and honored to be named as the 10th president of Adelphi University and as the first woman president.”
Riordan, whose term starts on July 1, 2015, was chosen unanimously out of more than 125 applicants by a search committee that included university trustees, students and faculty, according to a news release from the school.
Robert Willumstad, chairman of Adelphi’s board of trustees, said he was worried that selecting candidates would be a difficult process, noting that the search committee was tasked with narrowing potential candidates down to four.
“As it turned out, I was wrong, because I expected this process to be arduous and take a long time,” Willumstad said. “We were able to easily select the top four candidates and it wasn’t even close.”
Willumstad said he was surprised again when it came time to chose from the four candidates.
“At the end of the day, once again, I was wrong,” Willumstad said. “We wound up with overwhelming support for one candidate, and that was Dr. Riordan. “My fear was if she wasn’t going to take the job I didn’t know what we were going to do.”
Riordan has served as provost at the University of Kentucky since 2013, overseeing all of the university’s academic operations. From 2008 to 2013, Riordan served as dean of the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, Willumstad said.
Riordan has written more than 28 articles for various media outlets and academic journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Wall Street Journal.
She graduated from Georgia State University with a Ph.D. and an MBA and from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Textile Engineering degree, according to her website.
“We felt very strongly that we wanted to find the right person and I believe we have,” Willumstad said.
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