Gold named priority candidate to become NU president

Dr. Jeffery Gold was chosen Wednesday by the University of Nebraska Board of Regents as its priority candidate to become the system’s ninth president.

Gold is chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center and for a time was also the leader of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Gold was named UNMC chancellor in 2014, replacing longtime Chancellor Harold Maurer, and oversees a campus with seven colleges, a faculty and staff of roughly 7,000, and about 4,300 students – a number that has grown continually during his tenure.

Arriving in Omaha months before UNMC received acclaim for successfully treating American patients who contracted Ebola in West Africa in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, Gold leveraged the experience into new facilities and programs like the Global Center for Health Security.

He also has pushed Project Health, which seeks to build out academic, research, and patient care capacity at UNMC, add more than 4,200 jobs to the area, and generate as much as $1.1 billion in revenue several years into the project.

But his impact hasn’t stopped at the edge of UNMC’s campus.

Gold has been instrumental in the development of a $95 million Rural Health Education Building at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, partnering with Chancellor Doug Kristensen on a project to grow the health care work force who want to work in underserved areas across the state.

Along with building and developing programs, the board-certified heart surgeon was also tasked with leading UNO after a search to replace the retired Chancellor John Christensen failed in 2018. He ultimately led the NU system’s metropolitan campus for four years.

In 2021, then-NU President Ted Carter named Gold as the NU system’s chief academic officer, and last year tasked him with working alongside UNL Chancellor Rodney Bennett to lead a small task force to begin planning how to get the flagship campus back into the Association of American Universities.

Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation approved a plan for UNL and UNMC to report research expenditures together.

Gold is the first UNMC chancellor to be elevated to the president’s office in NU system history.

Regents announced their pick after a closed session that lasted about one and a half hours.

Wednesday’s announcement starts the clock on a 30-day vetting period required under state law, which will see Gold meet with students, faculty, staff and other NU stakeholders across the state.

The end of the vetting period would fall on April 19, when regents are scheduled to convene for a regularly scheduled meeting at Varner Hall in Lincoln.

The board could ratify their choice at that time and set a starting date for Gold to begin at NU officially.

It would also mark the end of a seven-month saga that began when Carter was announced as Ohio State’s top leader last August, emerging from a pool of more than 100 candidates across the country.

Carter started at his new job on Jan. 1; at that time, Chris Kabourek became interim president.

Regents met days after Ohio State’s announcement to begin planning their next steps to conduct their own national search to find Carter’s successor to lead four campuses, 50,000 students and 16,000 faculty and staff across the state.

In October, the board hired Academic Search Inc. led by Scottsbluff native Jay Lemons to help it cast a wide net for the best leader, which regents said they wanted to stay at NU for at least a decade.

The board also convened a 22-person committee, which included all eight elected regents, students, faculty and others to lead the search.

For months, the search proceeded relatively quietly and with little notice, as regents met behind closed doors to vet candidates and gauge support among members.

But, with the departure of Nebraska Athletics Director Trev Alberts to Texas A&M University last week — Alberts’ position had been moved from underneath the UNL chancellor to directly under the office of the president — the search received increased scrutiny for not having moved quicker.

Regents responded to criticism from Gov. Jim Pillen late last week that the search was taking too long by expressing a commitment to finding the right person.

On Friday, the board announced a special meeting for Wednesday, but the meeting agenda did not include any action items. That changed on Tuesday morning when naming a potential president was added to the agenda.