The Dole Institute of Politics is looking to expand its staff, its director said Thursday.

Bill Lacy, who took over at the Kansas University institute last month, said he would not fill the deputy director position vacated Sept. 30 by Richard Konzem.

Instead, Lacy said, he will use the $95,000 salary reserved for the position toward hiring three new staff members.

Konzem had been a longtime staff member in the athletic department before he took the job nearly a year ago.

“In all honesty, Richard was someone who knew the university,” Lacy said. “He had a lot of stature. My initial thought process was we needed someone like him. But I began to realize we couldn’t replace him.”

Lacy instead will create three positions:

• A facilities manager who will coordinate events at the west campus institute. Konzem formerly did most of those duties.
• A receptionist. The front desk at the institute currently is staffed by students and volunteers.

“We’re getting much more active on the programming front,” Lacy said. “We’re generating a lot more incoming calls.”

• A part-time programming and marketing assistant.

“It’s sort of the ‘If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound’ concept,” Lacy said. “You can put programs on ’til the cows come home, but if you don’t have people telling the community about it, it doesn’t do much good.”

In addition to Lacy, staffers are Barbara Ballard, associate director for outreach; Jean Bischoff, senior archivist; Linda Kay Pritchard, administrative officer; Jonathan Earle, associate director for academic programming; and Judy Sweets, audio-visual archivist.