After observing faculty members, administrators and students interact for three years, Mark Banaag feels the new chancellor must be skilled at building community.

“One of their responsibilities should definitely involve [promoting] a great sense of community, tolerance and respect towards his or her peers and the overarching student body,” said Banaag, a senior Visual Communication Design major.

 The university is conducting a nationwide search for a candidate to replace Thomas Keon as chancellor. Keon, who has announced he will step down from the chancellor role at the end of the 2024 school year, attracted national notoriety after he made comments critics called racist during the December 2022 commencement ceremony.

After hearing Keon’s remark on Twitter, Banaag said his first thought was, “this is the guy who’s representing us?”

 “If this person truly represented every facet of PNW’s community, why would he make this comment/joke,” he said.. “What’s he like behind closed doors?”

Banaag hopes the committee selects someone who can bring together the PNW community. 

“I’m looking for excellent leadership, a mindset rooted in making our campus-wide communities better and an overall professional conduct,” he said. “Strengthening the bonds … can lead to a … mutual understanding of each other, especially considering the cultures present in communities and personal things we go through in our day-to-day lives.”

“The ways in which [chancellors] encourage and foster a healthier social and academic environment is single handedly the most important part of their job,” Banaag said. “They can easily influence what kind of environments they’re in charge of depending on the way they act and run things, either publicly or behind the scenes.”

While previous chancellors have focused on expanding the university or balancing budgets, Banaag believes a top priority for the new chancellor should be to focus on the students who are already here.

“If I were the chancellor of PNW, I’d focus most of my efforts on improving the overall quality of life of the community,” he said. “I’d find ways to shape a better, more tolerant, educated, understanding and overall genuine community of both faculty and students by hosting a variety of speaking events that touch upon social issues surrounding our communities and how they can be addressed in hands-on, creative ways.”