IOWA CITY Iowa

Sally Mason just wants to listen.

It sounds like a simple task for a woman just installed as the University of Iowa's newest president. But Mason believes hearing from the university community is as critical as anything else she can do to find success in Iowa City.

"I want to learn what's happening here, what has happened here, and what people's dreams are for here," Mason said during a recent interview with the Associated Press in her campus office.

Sitting next to vases of bright yellow roses gifts from new friends at Iowa and old ones at Purdue University, where she served as a provost for six years Mason preached the virtues of due diligence.

She will take her time laying out specific plans for Iowa. There is no rush, she says, and in any case she wants to use her first months in office to talk with the school's many stakeholders. Discussing a broad agenda without a better grasp on the university's culture would be a mistake, she said.

"A lot of this ... is having conversations and listening to people and sorting through some of the messages that I'll receive before I sit down and try to plot out a very specific agenda," Mason said.

The 57-year-old is taking over more than a year after the man she replaced David Skorton left.

In July 2006, Skorton left Iowa to become the president at Cornell University. His departure set off a tortuous and contentious search for a new president that initially ended in failure.

Regents scrapped their first search then, amid uproar from the campus community, started over. The process eventually led them to Mason.

University officials were actually interested in Mason from the beginning of the embattled search. During the first part of the search, Mason said, Purdue was looking for its own new president.

Mason said she got a call from Iowa officials sounding her out about the job, but she was "exceedingly reluctant."

"I was certainly thinking more about what might happen at Purdue than what might happen at Iowa," she said.