Oakland University Names Pescovitz President

ROCHESTER HILLS, MI — Dr. Ora Hirsch Pescovitz is Oakland University’s new president. She was officially announced by the Board of Trustees as their choice early Thursday afternoon. Pescovitz will replace outgoing president George Hynd this August.

She beat out finalist Carl Camden, the former Kelly Services CEO, for the job. Pescovitz received a five-year contract with an annual salary of $457,500 and will live in Sunset Terrace, the university’s presidential house, the Detroit News reported. She will become Oakland’s 7th president.

"Everything I got to know has really impressed me," Pescovitz told a large crowd gathered for the announcement. "The people of Oakland University -- from the students to the extraordinary faculty have really impressed me."

She was faculty’s hands-down choice. "Between the two candidates, faculty prefer Dr. Pescovitz by a landslide,” faculty union head Kenneth Mitton, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at Oakland, told the Detroit Free Press earlier this week. “As a person who gets information from many sources on campus, I predict that if Dr. Camden is hired, several more faculty will go onto the market to leave OU. This also appeared in the survey comments. If Dr. Pescovitz is hired, those faculty will stay longer to see how the next year goes."

Pescovitz, 60, is the former CEO of the University of Michigan Health System who now is a senior vice president at Eli Lilly and Co., and U.S. medical leader for Lilly BioMedicines. She is, by training, a pediatric endocrinologist and researcher, and has published more a number of papers and books, the Free Press reported.

Scott Kunselman, OU’s chief operating officer, predicts Pescovitz will face numerous challenges as Oakland University’s next president. Chief among them will be changing the university’s enrollment strategy and improving budget support through philanthropy and state appropriations, the Detroit News reported.

Oakland, like other colleges and universities, is facing competition for students since the pool of graduating high school seniors has been and will continue to decline. Since 80 percent of OU’s 20,012 students come from Oakland and Macomb counties, the university will have to look to students outside those counties, Kunselman told the News.

“We’ll be competing more than usual than other institutions for students as we will look to other students outside our normal market,” he said.

Oakland University has doubled its student population in the past two decades, the Detroit News reported. The university now has approximately 20,000 students.

Continued growth in students and revenue will be challenging, Kunselman said. Oakland gets the lowest per-student appropriation from the state, $2,831 per student, the Detroit News reported.. Other schools, such as Michigan Technological University, get more than three times as much state aid per student, Kunselman told the newspaper.

Photo courtesy of Oakland University