The Board of Education for Linn-Benton Community College will meet this morning to decide whether to add site visits to the search for a president to succeed Rita Cavin.

Board members will use comment cards from public forums with both candidates Friday in making the decision, said Marlene Propst, director of college advancement.

"We probably won't have a decision until mid-November, possibly by the board meeting," which is at 6 p.m. Nov. 19, Propst said.

The finalists, Gregory J. Hamann and Darlene G. Miller, fielded dozens of questions from students and staff at Friday afternoon's public forums. About 100 people attended.

Hamann is currently president of Clatsop Community College in Astoria. He also was dean of administration at Northwest College in Wyoming, and director of administrative services, director of human resources and associate dean of students at Whitworth College in Spokane.

Clatsop is a wonderful institution, Hamann said, but he feels he has achieved what he was hired there to do.

Of LBCC, Hamann said: "One of the things I know is, you have a passion to provide educational opportunities for people other people didn't quite see the possibilities in. And we do great things because of that."

Miller left a job as president of Manchester Community College in Manchester, N.H., this past August. She was vice president for workforce and economic development at Shoreline Community College and dean of instruction for professional and technical programs and executive director of workforce development at Green River Community College, both in Washington. She also was dean of business technology at Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio.

Miller said she wants to return to the west coast and be a part of a smaller community.

Her leadership style, she said, is to "hire good people and get out of their way," and her educational philosophy is "about learning and about access ... about students being able to come to us and get what they need."

Both candidates acknowledged increasingly tight finances for community colleges and said they believe strongly in allowing all departments to give input on budgets and other major decisions. Both cited life-changing experiences in art galleries as young adults, which prompted them to value liberal arts classes and non-credit college experiences as deeply as workforce skills.

They also stressed open, frequent communication and a need to create atmospheres of trust. Miller said she makes it a point to walk frequently around campus and talk with people, while Hamann holds regular coffee gatherings and interacts with students through running and surfing clubs.

A sampling of paraphrased questions and answers with both candidates:

Q: You're forced to reduce the budget by 10 percent. Where do you begin?

Miller: We went through a significant cut a year ago, and the budget capital planning team came up with recommendations.

Hamann: The state just asked us to do that last week. You have to bring people together to look at your core purpose when you come to that question. That's what we did: We got the leaders of the faculty, part-time, management, classified, and had regular meetings, weekly, to answer that question.

Q: What is the role of a community college president in creating a welcoming atmosphere for people who come from diverse backgrounds, people of color, people who are first-generation college students? How do you welcome, retain them and help them advance?

Miller: The goal is to create a welcoming and safe environment. The role is to model the behavior and the responsibility is to deal with the situation if it's brought to your attention that it's not a welcoming place. It is important to recognize and affirm your own culture and what makes you unique, and to create an atmosphere of open and honest communication.

Hamann: At Clatsop we have five core values, and one of them is diversity. We are not perfect, but we are working on it. The president's role is first to make sure you have a statement and purpose that affirms the core value. Diversity is about all of us feeling valued for who we are and what we can contribute. We must model this value and we all have to work to personify it.

Q. What are your feelings on outsourcing?

Miller: Manchester outsourced cleaning. People weren't crazy about the idea, but it did free them to do other things and not work second and third shifts. We changed the scope of their job.

Hamann: In smaller communities, there isn't many opportunities for outsourcing. What's important is to figure out your mission and focus your energy on that. Sometimes it's better for someone else to do the other things, but I would have to look very, very carefully before doing something like that.

Q: Some colleges are following the trend of hiring more part-time instructors. Your thoughts?

Miller: I don't like the trend, but I don't know that it will reverse, given that funding is going in the wrong direction.

Hamann: From an instructural perspective, as opposed to economic, there is a clear advantage to having full-time instructors. But at Clatsop, part-timers do create a curriculum breadth I can't always have with full time. For instance, we have a historic preservation-restoration program. It's a construction program, and we use a combination of full-timers in graphic CAD classes, and tradespeople on the skill sets. It allows us to sustain something we might not have otherwise.

Q: Talk about a time you've faced a controversial proposal.

Miller: We had an employee once who shared we had a hostile work environment. Bullying. We ended up needing an outside investigation because there was so much conflict.

Hamann: One of the things I say is, I need people who have ideas different from mine. We need to create an atmosphere that says being wrong isn't fatal. We have to have the capacity to fail from time to time. An example of a controversial proposal: Smoking on campus. It was controversial. We had lots of external pressure. The dean suggested we have an internal dialogue to see what would work for us. We set aside a smoking area, and we unanimously supported that internally. I think we did the right thing for our institution.