A candidate to lead Kansas University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences said the university’s largest academic unit lacks vision.

Ruth Maki, chairwoman of psychology at Texas Tech University, is one of four finalists to become the college’s dean. She met with students, faculty and staff Monday.

“The college doesn’t seem to have a set of articulated goals,” she said. “The university does, and maybe individual departments do.”

Maki said improving graduate teaching assistants’ stipends would be a priority.

“Here the graduate stipends are too low,” she said. “The way to increase those probably isn’t going to come from the state. You’d have to do it through tuition or raising money for scholarships.”

She also said she would consider reorganizing the college’s faculty governance system. The College Assembly, she said, has too many members and seems to be a “rubber-stamp” group.

“It looks to me it may be a farce to have this College Assembly the way it is now,” she said.

Maki has been at Texas Tech since 1997. She came from North Dakota State University, where she taught from 1973 to 1996.

Maki was the fourth finalist to interview on campus. Other finalists are Kim Wilcox, executive director of the Kansas Board of Regents and a former KU faculty member; Kip Hodges, a professor of geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and John Lipski, head of the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese department at Pennsylvania State University.

Rich Givens, assistant provost and chairman of the search committee, has said he wants to hire the new dean by the end of the school year. The start date is July 1.

The dean will replace Sally Frost-Mason, who left last spring to become provost at Purdue University. Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, associate provost, has served as interim dean since Frost-Mason left.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is KU’s largest academic unit, with 14,000 students and more than 500 faculty members.