Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway will play a key role in selecting the next president of the NCAA.

Hemenway has been selected as chairman of the NCAA Division I board of directors. He also will be one of five members on the search committee for the organization’s next president.

Former KU Chancellor Gene Budig, who also served as president of Major League Baseball’s American League, has been identified as a potential candidate.

“Gene is an obvious name to come up because of his experience as a university chancellor and a person who’s been involved in Major League Baseball,” Hemenway said. “There are a number of similar individuals who have similar experience, and I expect their names to come up, too.”

The current president, Cedric Dempsey, will retire at the end of the year. The NCAA has hired a firm to identify from 10 to 15 candidates by August and plans to select a president by Nov. 1.

“The search firm is casting a very wide net,” Hemenway said. “I think personal integrity is going to be one of the qualifications we’re looking for. Also, we’re looking for somebody to handle a relatively large bureaucracy. What the NCAA really is is a regulatory agency for intercollegiate athletics.

We need somebody who can manage the regulations for fair competition for colleges and universities.”

Hemenway said he expected academic reform to be a major focus of his tenure as chairman of the 18-member Division I board. His term will end in January 2005. He said the NCAA needed a more universal way to calculate academic progress.

“We need to focus on intercollegiate athletics having a set of strong academic reforms to ensure that student athletes are making progress toward graduation,” Hemenway said.

Though the position will take some time away from his duties at KU, Hemenway said that time should be minimal because many of the board meetings occurred by telephone conference call. He also said KU could benefit from the position.

“I think anytime you have a responsible position like this as the chief governing board of the organization, it enables you to keep track of what’s going on,” Hemenway said. “It lets you know what the latest innovations are in intercollegiate athletics.”