After stints as provost and interim president, Aondover Tarhule is officially the 21st president of Illinois State University.
ISU’s Board of Trustees on Monday approved a four-year contract establishing Tarhule as its permanent president until March 17, 2028. He will make $450,000 per year, according to an employment agreement with the board.
“Under my leadership, Illinois State will remain visible, engaged and a collaborative partner committed to improving the quality of life and enhancing the sense of belonging for everyone in our community,” Tarhule said at a board meeting Monday. “My highest priority as the 21st president is that Illinois State successfully navigates this moment and positions itself to succeed, thrive and be resilient.”
Tarhule had been interim president since February 2023, after a board decision to part ways with Terri Goss Kinzy, ISU’s first female president who resigned midway through her term for unspecified reasons. The board convened a 29-member search committee later that year tasked with working alongside an external search firm to find a permanent replacement for Kinzy; Tarhule was one of four candidates who made the final cut before being selected as president.
Tarhule first came to ISU as provost and vice president for academic affairs in 2020.
Larry Dietz, a former university president of seven years, praised Tarhule in comments to the media Monday, saying that when he hired Tarhule as provost and vice president four years ago, he “felt at the time he had the characteristics to be a president if he wanted to do that — not knowing that this would happen today.”
“Higher education is changing. I think he has a passion for finding solutions to that. I don’t think there’s one major switch to flip that’s going to cure all of the ills of higher education or Illinois State, but he’s very capable of understanding the trends that are out there and trying to provide plans,” Dietz said. “He’s going to be really good at providing plans that will be, in my estimation, many and varied to meet some of the new challenges of higher education.”
Tarhule assumes the top job at ISU ahead of a number of challenges facing higher education — like a projected drop in the number of graduating high schoolers nationwide that will impact enrollments — and the university in general, including funding sources, the largest of which is currently student tuition. He said his “highest priority” is addressing both of those issues in particular.
“We have a better position than most to deal with these challenges,” he said. “If you turn on the news, go to the internet, every day you see a university that is facing a financial crisis or enrollment challenges; we are not in that situation yet. My job … is to make sure that either we never get to that point, or if we do, we’re able to mitigate it.”
Among other initiatives, Tarhule pointed to a planned, forthcoming hire of a federal lobbyist who will advocate for ISU and related funding opportunities as part of multiple, ongoing efforts to ensure the university’s stability in the coming years. Tarhule also said the university has “reactivated” its Redbird Caucus, a group of legislators and ISU graduates and plans to “increase our level of engagement and interactions with them so we can push forward in the legislature bills that are of support to Illinois State.”
Asked when he plans to make permanent hires for a number of administrative roles that are either vacant or filled in the interim, Tarhule said hoped to fill them “as quickly as possible.” ISU currently has an interim athletics director and an interim vice president of finance and planning, among other vacancies.
While “the people in those roles have been very dependable and we know that they’ve kept us going, there is nevertheless an element of uncertainty that hangs around if the term is interim,” Tarhule said. “Then there is some ripple effects, some downstream effects, other positions that then become interim as well. So I’d like to move as quickly as possible to fill as many of those as we can, so that we can bring some clarity and certainty to the business of the university.”
As part of his employment agreement, Tarhule will also remain a tenured professor in ISU's Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment. His research interests and numerous publications have included focuses on environmental sciences and sustainability.
On Monday, he said his presidency represented the "culmination of dreams that began with an illiterate peasant farmer in Nigeria more than half a century ago" — a tribute to his father who supported him as a first-generation college student "with every ounce of his will and resources."
Tarhule’s transition to the presidency was effective immediately Monday.
