The committee’s recommendation now goes to the Board of Trustees.

It also includes language adding additional one-year contract extensions up to 2020 if Ramsey and the Trustees can reach agreement. Ramsey’s current contract runs out in June 2012, and he has told the trustees that he is only interested in one additional year – not two as the ad committee is recommending.

We’re extremely happy with the job President Ramsey is doing, said trustee J. Chester Porter, chairman of the ad committee. We want him to stay.

Porter said persuading Ramsey to stay until 2020 would help take the university into its next strategic plan. The current set of long-range goals is called the 2020 plan because that’s the year it is to be completed.

But Ramsey said that in June 2013 he will be 65 years old and it will be time to pass the baton to some new blood. He is willing to stay on as president to steer the university through a tough economic and budgeting period and not saddle a new president with financial problems, he said.

UofL soon will launch a new capital campaign which Ramsey said he hopes to have successfully concluded or have well under way by the time he would leave in 2013.

The next scheduled meeting of the UofL Board of Trustees is Jan. 14.