CHICAGO – Preliminary interviews with candidates seeking to be the next University of Illinois president appear to be under way this week in Chicago.

The presidential search committee met Monday evening and all day Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Rosemont and planned to continue meeting there today and again Friday afternoon. All sessions are closed to the public.

Search committee members did not return phone calls Monday or Tuesday regarding the search.

However, Trustee Pamela Strobel, chair of the 19-member search committee, told The News-Gazette last week that the panel was preparing to do preliminary interviews with candidates as it drafts a short list for the full UI Board of Trustees.

And high-level search committees at the university frequently conduct interviews at hotels near O'Hare for the convenience of candidates.

Strobel said the search committee met in closed session at the UI President's House in Urbana last week to review applicants and winnow down the list to a manageable number to interview. In a briefing for UI trustees, Strobel told the board that the committee hoped to do preliminary interviews soon, said Trustee Edward McMillan.

The committee received hundreds of applications for the job, including "a number of extremely interesting and exciting" ones, Strobel said.

The committee will take a smaller group of candidates, perhaps eight to 12, to the board of trustees, which will choose finalists to interview, according to the committee's previous comments.

"I can't predict or say exactly when that's going to occur," Strobel said last week. "We're making excellent progress. It's moving along on exactly the timeline we had hoped."

Strobel said she hopes to get the first round of interviews completed this month.

"We don't want to leave them in that limbo," she said.

The goal is to have a new president on the job by the beginning of the fall semester next August, or sooner.

The winning candidate will replace former UI President B. Joseph White, who resigned effective Dec. 31 following an admissions scandal. An investigation found that some university applicants who had connections to trustees, politicians and donors were admitted over more-qualified students.

Former UI President Stanley Ikenberry is serving as interim president until White's successor is chosen. He was given the same $450,000 annual salary that White received, or about $319,000 for January to mid-August, plus about $62,500 for his time as interim president-designate last fall.

The presidential search committee, announced Nov. 12, includes three trustees, eight faculty members, three students from the UI's three campuses, one representative from the alumni association and one from the UI Foundation, one administrative officer, one academic professional and one civil service representative.

Isaacson, Miller, a national executive search firm, was hired to help with the search.

The committee first developed a job description for the presidency and held forums on the UI's three campuses to get public input about what students, faculty and staff wanted in a new leader.

At a forum in December, students and faculty pleaded for ethical leadership, openness and a commitment to core academic missions of teaching and research.

Several speakers asked if the public would have a chance to meet presidential candidates, saying the UI needs transparency now more than ever.

But Ikenberry and Strobel said all candidates will be kept confidential. If names were revealed, they said, many top candidates would withdraw to protect their current jobs.

UI spokesman Tom Hardy said Tuesday the UI's process this time is more public than in the past. Three trustees serve on the panel, so its meetings have to be announced publicly, he said. Past presidential search committees have been led by faculty.

"We're operating under different circumstances than we have in the past," he said.

Ikenberry has said most top universities conduct closed searches. However, presidential candidates have gone through public interviews in recent years in Texas, Michigan and Florida, where openness is required by law.

In 2007, Avijit Ghosh, then dean of the UI College of Business, was named a finalist for the presidency of Western Michigan University. The school chose John Dunn, former interim chancellor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, but Ghosh was promoted later that year to UI vice president for technology and economic development.

The public notice for this week's search committee meetings did not list arrangements for the public to participate by teleconference, unlike the committee's previous meetings this winter. Monday's agenda called for the board to spend about 15 minutes in open session before adjourning to closed session.

Board Secretary Michele Thompson said teleconferencing is made available whenever a committee member can't attend in person. All 19 committee members are attending this week's meetings, she said.