The Presidential Search Advisory Committee Monday narrowed it’s list of 15 applicants to eight semi-finalists to be interviewed at an off-campus site later this month.

The interviews will span three days, beginning on Feb. 27 and running through March 1. However, the location of those interviews will remain confidential to protect the candidates’ anonymity. However, at a previous committee meeting that site was identified as being in Indianapolis.

The committee also named two alternates semi-finalists Monday.

However, as the consultant hired to aid in the search, reminded the committee, the names of the applicants cannot be divulged until a list of finalists is released next month.

Jim Appleberry, of Academic Search Consultation Service, the firm hired by the search committee, stressed the importance of applicant confidentiality at Monday’s meeting. Eastern’s Board of Trustees will pay Appleberry’s firm a sum of $48,000 for its assistance in the search process.

Committee member Bill Addison, chair of the psychology department, asked Appleberry Monday if committee members could call references that they knew to inquire about the semifinalists. Appleberry said the confidentiality involved in the search requires that committee members cannot conduct such interviews until the finalists are chosen.

“At this point, in order to maintain confidentiality, you should not contact anyone but their listed references,” he said.

Addison expressed concern that waiting until the finalists are announced may be too far along in the process.

“At that point we’ll have only talked to reference’s they’ve provided,” he said.

Appleberry assured the committee that he would be getting information about the candidates “behind the scenes” and that he would inform them of any pertinent information he might discover.

The three to five finalists, will be invited to Eastern for on-campus interviews in March, when they will meet with various campus groups.

On Monday, Appleberry provided the committee with a questionnaire to be distributed during those on-campus interviews. The questionnaires will be used to gauge the campus’ feedback.

Committee members have until Friday to submit to Appleberry, via e-mail, any suggestions they have regarding the questionnaire. Appleberry said he would be finalizing the “machine readable” form on Saturday.

At the onset of Monday’s meeting, before the committee voted to approve minutes of previous closed session meetings, committee member Luis Clay Mendez, a foreign languages professor, requested that votes made during those meetings be registered in the meeting’s minutes.

Bob Manion, chair of the committee and member of Eastern’s Board of Trustees requested that discussion on that subject be tabled until the committee entered closed session later in the meeting.

“I have mixed emotions about that,” he said. “That’s something we’re going to talk about anyway.”