The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents on Tuesday appointed Joan T.A. Gabel as the five-campus system’s next president, despite tensions over transparency during the search process.
Gabel, provost of the University of South Carolina at Columbia, will be the first woman to hold the job when she takes office, in July, the University of Minnesota announced.
The final stages of Minnesota’s search hit a snag just as the regents were preparing to pick finalists. In early December, two of the three leading contenders told the board they would agree to be publicly named as a finalist, as state law requires, only if they were the sole remaining candidate. Only “Candidate A” — Gabel — agreed to be publicly identified in any case.
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The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents on Tuesday appointed Joan T.A. Gabel as the five-campus system’s next president, despite tensions over transparency during the search process.
Gabel, provost of the University of South Carolina at Columbia, will be the first woman to hold the job when she takes office, in July, the University of Minnesota announced.
The final stages of Minnesota’s search hit a snag just as the regents were preparing to pick finalists. In early December, two of the three leading contenders told the board they would agree to be publicly named as a finalist, as state law requires, only if they were the sole remaining candidate. Only “Candidate A” — Gabel — agreed to be publicly identified in any case.
That willingness was one reason regents felt comfortable moving her forward, The Chronicle reported. Last week she was named the only finalist for the job.
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The process reopened longstanding questions about the transparency of presidential-search processes at public institutions, as Minnesota, Michigan State University, and the University of Florida have come under scrutiny for hosting anonymous candidates and holding shadowy off-site meetings.
Minnesota’s top three candidates were chosen from a pool of 67 who had been screened by a 23-member advisory committee that included three members of the Board of Regents.
One board member, Darrin M. Rosha, told The Chroniclelast weekthat the board’s holding private meetings with mystery candidates had violated open-meetings laws. The board chair, David J. McMillan, disagreed.
Rosha was the only board member to vote against naming Gabel as the sole finalist. He said it was in protest of the process, in which only five of the 11 regents had met with the top contenders in closed meetings. Minnesota law requires that candidates be publicly named as finalists before formally interviewing with the Board of Regents.
“I don’t think it complies with the law,” Rosha told The Chronicle. “It certainly doesn’t comply with the spirit of the law.”
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McMillan, the chairman, said the board’s secret meetings with the candidates did not amount to interviews. He said they were intended to thank the candidates for their interest, and to urge them to go public with their identities.
“I must not be a very good salesman,” McMillan said, referring to his inability to persuade the candidates.
Abdul M. Omari, a regent and chairman of the advisory committee, told The Chronicle last week that Gabel had been the panel’s consensus pick. “We just also got lucky that she was willing to go public,” he said.
Minnesota has been here before. Watchdog groups and media outlets criticized the university for an opaque process when it named its sole public finalist in 2010: Eric W. Kaler, the current president.
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The university also encountered a hurdle this year when it determined that its initial search firm, Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates, was also consulting with a rival, Michigan State University, on its presidential search. Minnesota fired the firm in October.
Steven Johnson is an Indiana-born journalist who’s reported stories about business, culture, and education for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.