In a brief meeting this week, community leaders sought to review past concerns with Towson University as the school launches a search for new leadership.

Ed Kilcullen, a past president of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations, stressed to the committee searching for a new Towson president that the community is "not against the university growing." But Kilcullen said the next president needs to balance growth needs against community impact.

"Towson University is a great university in part because it has great neighborhoods around it," he said.

Kilcullen echoed the concerns of the less than 20 people who attended a brief community town hall meeting held by the search committee on Monday night.

Committee chairwoman Louise Michaux Gonzales, a University System of Maryland Board of Regents member, set the tone for the night by inviting residents to discuss their issues with the university but added, "This is not a forum to resolve whatever those issues are."

The committee of faculty, staff, students and alumni is looking for a successor to Robert Caret, who has led the 21,000-student university since 2003. The search is expected to take four to six months. The town hall was the second of three the committee has held to establish a criteria for the next president. The first meeting, with students, was held last week. A third meeting, with the faculty and staff, will be held on Thursday. The committee is also collecting feedback through its website.

Jim and Gina Fischer have lived on Stanmore Road in Rodgers Forge, right behind the university, for 22 years. Their daughter is a TU nursing student.

"I think the next president should be more involved in the community rather than sending his henchmen," Gina Fischer said. "(Caret) lives in a very secluded neighborhood."

Caret currently lives in a university-owned mansion in Baltimore's Guilford neighborhood, which was purchased during the short tenure of Caret's predecessor, Mark Perkins. The Fischers, and many of the residents who spoke at the Monday meeting, said the next president should spend less time in Guilford and more time in Rodgers Forge and other neighborhoods closer to the university.

"The word that I think sums it up for the community, it really is 'engagement,'" Jim Fischer said.

Some of the roughly 10 residents who attended raised concerns that neighbors were not specifically included in the search committee. Several of the committee members, when introducing themselves, revealed they were also current or former Towson residents.

Timothy Sullivan, president of the University Senate and a Knollwood-Donnybrook resident, said during the meeting that many of the issues raised sounded familiar.

Janice Moore, a past president of the Rodgers Forge Community Association, asked the committee to find a president with "a sense of humor ... somebody who's not insulated in their ivory tower." She added that as an employee of Johns Hopkins University, she occasionally gets e-mails from that school's president, Ronald Daniels.

A Towson Manor Village resident, Kilcullen also brought up Towson Green, the development now under construction in his neighborhood. Long before the Bozzuto Group came to revitalize the property, houses there had turned mostly into poorly cared-for student rentals. Elsewhere, Kilcullen said, he sees that process repeating.

He, like other residents at the Monday meeting, said Caret has not been visible or responsive enough in dealing with the community, often sending assistants to meetings and rarely appearing himself.

"When I send a letter to the president of the university, I like to get a letter back from the president of the university," Kilcullen said.

Kilcullen also pointed to TU's growing class sizes and studies that say students who live on campus perform better.

"It's not just the residents that are impacted by the growth, but your faculty and students," he said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Jim and Gina Fischer. Patch regrets the error.