Candidate for Chapman Presidency to Visit Campus

The president of Emerson College in Boston is scheduled to tour the Chapman College campus in Orange next week as one of three candidates seeking to become Chapman’s 11th president, the chairman of the college’s search committee confirmed Thursday.

Leslie Duryea, a Chapman trustee, said Allen Koenig, president of Emerson since 1979, will be on campus on Monday and Tuesday as the 128-year-old private college continues a search that has taken more than a year.

Koenig’s visit is part of “the normal process of investigating candidates,” Duryea said, adding that Koenig has not been offered any position.

Interim President James Doti is the other contender identified by university officials to fill the spot vacated when G.T. (Buck) Smith left the post in March, 1988, said Pamela Ezell, a college spokeswoman. The other candidate has not been identified by the 12-member search committee, Ezell said.

The new president would oversee a $23-million expansion announced in May, including a 200-bed dormitory, an academic building and a student union.

The college’s master plan calls for buildings in some campus areas to reach heights of 62 feet, and some nearby residents have complained that high-rise buildings would not be in harmony with the neighborhood of Victorian and early California-style, one- and two-story homes and businesses. The college has been based in the Old Towne district of Orange since 1954.

The new president also faces financial difficulties in the athletic department, which cut six teams in January to save money. Doti supports a move to make Chapman, a Division II school, into a Division III school, which does not offer athletic scholarships.

Ezell said most new presidents traditionally have come from outside the college.

“We haven’t had too many presidents, so it’s hard to really find a trend,” she said.

Koenig would not comment on his trip to Orange County.

Doti was on vacation through Wednesday and could not be reached for comment, his secretary said Thursday. The former dean of Chapman’s business school has been at the college since 1974.

Koenig also taught mass education while at Emerson, a liberal-arts college with a strong focus on communications that has about the same enrollment--2,185 last year--as Chapman’s.

Before coming to the Boston school, Doti was vice president of Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa, and vice president of university relations at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

He is the president of the New England chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He has written about labor relations in the broadcast industry and higher education and is a former editor of Educational Broadcasting Review.

Koenig, 50, a Los Angeles native, received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and telecommunications from USC, a masters’s degree in speech communication from Stanford University and a doctorate in speech communication from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.