Good college headhunters are mostly invisible.
These highly paid consultants, who have significant influence over how academic-leadership searches play out, pride themselves on being behind-the-scenes facilitators, connecting governing boards and search committees with dream candidates. But times have changed. The often politicized and sometimes rancorous process of selecting college leaders has come under greater public scrutiny, and the search-firm industry now finds itself on the defensive.
On Monday a well-known search consultant resigned from his advising role at Florida State University, where professors are fuming about a presidential search that has been upended by a lawmaker’s interest in the job. R. William (Bill) Funk’s decision to step aside came days after the Faculty Senate issued a vote of no confidence in the headhunter. Mr. Funk, president of R. William Funk & Associates, called the vote “ridiculous.”
“I candidly think it was reckless and unfounded,” he said.
Over this past weekend, while on vacation in Las Vegas, Mr. Funk said he had come to the conclusion that the candidacy of State Sen. John E. Thrasher, a powerful Republican who is a Florida State alumnus, had made it impossible for the university to attract strong contenders. Some observers have said that the emergence of another high-profile candidate, the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, makes Senator Thrasher seem like less of a shoo-in and generates more potential interest from other applicants. But Mr. Funk said he was unconvinced.
“I just didn’t see a win down the road for us,” he said. “A win would be just an excellent candidate selected that we recruited, and we didn’t think we could recruit people we would be proud of under the circumstances.”
Mr. Funk initially advised the search committee to take an up-or-down vote on Mr. Thrasher, saying that the senator had cast such a long shadow over the process that the committee had to either pick him or move on.
But that advice created the impression in some quarters that the consultant was trying to accelerate the process for an applicant with an inside track.
“There was such paranoia here that when we made that proposal, they interpreted us as being part of a cabal to hire Thrasher, when in fact we were being as honest as we could be,” Mr. Funk said.
The no-confidence vote in Mr. Funk appears to be the first of its kind involving a search consultant. Mr. Funk said he was “mystified at how we got to be the focus of some attention.”
The vote, however, is just one indication of professors’ growing skepticism about a private industry that plays an outsize role in selecting academic leaders.
Conflicts Over Confidentiality
At Illinois Wesleyan University, which concluded a search for a new provost three years ago, professors are still grappling with what they learned about the influence of search consultants. During a 2010 meeting, the headhunter warned members of the search committee not to promise their colleagues that the search would include a public phase, the group’s chairman recalls. The best candidates often fear jeopardizing their current positions, the committee was told, and utmost confidentiality may be necessary to land the right person.
“I knew right away that this was going to be a kind of tricky situation,” said the chairman, Michael J. Theune, who is an associate professor of English.
When committee members floated the idea that the university’s next provost might be named without ever meeting with the full faculty, a minor revolt ensued. “Emotions ran high,” Mr. Theune said.
The tensions that emerged at Illinois Wesleyan—and, to some extent, now at Florida State—mirror those in searches across the nation. Faculty members, many of whom have never participated in an administrative search, are often out of their depth when the process begins. They are used to being the experts in the room, but on these occasions they defer to the knowledge of outsiders, who bring with them a host of cautionary tales about searches that have imploded when candidates’ names leaked to newspapers.
Headhunters’ preaching about the value of confidentiality clashes with an academic culture that honors transparency and consensus.
At the urging of the faculty, Illinois Wesleyan’s president decided that the provost search should include an open phase for finalists. There is no indication that any strong candidates were scared off or withdrew because of that decision, which has left some professors to wonder whether search consultants are needlessly making the process more secretive.
“It is a trend, but it is a trend because they created it,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, a professor and chairman of computer science at Illinois Wesleyan.
Mr. Tiede and Mr. Theune wrote a report on provost searches that will be presented on Friday at the annual conference of the American Association of University Professors, in Washington. In a survey of 72 private, liberal-arts colleges, they found evidence that colleges that use search firms are nearly four times as likely to make search-committee members sign confidentiality agreements.
The use of search firms for provosts at liberal-arts colleges has soared in recent years, the survey found. Only 31 percent of the respondents used a search firm from 1997 to 2007. For searches that occurred from 2007 to 2012, 75 percent used a consultant.
Mr. Theune said the study raises questions about the influence of search firms, but he is careful to note that Anne M. Coyle, the search consultant whom Illinois Wesleyan hired, did not force her opinions on the committee. She laid out the possible ramifications of their decisions, he said, but stressed that “this is your faculty’s search.”
“I’m not exactly sure how that process would or could have worked without some of the assistance that was given to us by the search firm,” Mr. Theune said.
Risking Exposure
The world has changed a lot since Ms. Coyle got into the executive-search business, more than two decades ago. In her early days as a consultant, she would call up candidates and tell them to stand by their fax machines so that no one else in the office would intercept sensitive documents.
Email has made those sub-rosa communiqués a lot easier, but technology also threatens the clandestine nature of the executive search. Now more than ever, a candidate who visits a campus risks exposure back home. With one click of a cellphone camera, a student can unmask a would-be president.
“Information travels so much more quickly,” said Ms. Coyle, a vice president at Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates. “Twenty years ago, you could visit a campus, maybe even have a meeting with the full faculty, and perhaps nobody would even know where you were.”
Search firms are paid by colleges, and the tab can be hundreds of thousands of dollars for a major research institution. Even though headhunters work for colleges, they often appear most interested in satisfying applicants. Both colleges and consultants stand to benefit, headhunters say, when candidates feel they have been protected throughout the search process.
“We’re hired by the client, but it’s really the candidates whose lives we can put into turmoil,” said Kenneth L. Kring, co-managing director for global education practice at Korn Ferry. “My truest loyalty is to the candidates.”
Search consultants emphasize the need for confidentiality in the interest of protecting applicants, but secrecy also ensures that headhunters will have a private roster of names to use in future searches.
Search consultants have a financial interest in keeping candidates’ names under wraps, said Clay Shirky, who writes about how the Internet has upset old power structures by making information widely available.
“We are absolutely biased as a culture, if not a species, to regard information we think of as private as being inherently more valuable,” said Mr. Shirky, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press, 2008).
“In a way, search firms need to make what they do look more valuable than what it is,” he continued. “In fact, it’s just the act of collating Rolodexes and seeing who is interested.”
Search consultants may have a variety of reasons for advising colleges to keep a tight lid on the names of applicants, but state open-records laws can complicate that task at public institutions. In Florida, for example, the names of applicants and nominees are released early in the process. Consultants have found a way around that, however, by encouraging the strongest applicants not to formally apply until the last minute.
For candidates, particularly sitting presidents, open search processes can create awkwardness back home.
In 2012, Ricardo Azziz, president of Georgia Regents University, was nominated for the University of Florida presidency. He did not even know who had nominated him, he told The Chronicle, but he had to field some uncomfortable questions from reporters.
“It’s a disadvantage for Florida,” he said of the open search process. “It’s too much exposure for presidents.”
In March, Mr. Azziz’s name surfaced again in connection with a presidential search, this time at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. When the news got out, he removed himself from consideration.
Mr. Azziz’s experience highlights some of the difficulties candidates face because they have no control over how a search process will unfold. He said that he had been given assurances that his name would be released only if he was a finalist for the job, but that the search committee had reversed its decision.
Asked if he felt betrayed, Mr. Azziz said, “It doesn’t shine well on the process.”
When the process is flawed, search consultants can expect some of the blame as well as heightened scrutiny of the fees they command. Mr. Funk, who withdrew as Florida State’s consultant, conceded that “we get paid a lot of money.” His firm earned $230,000, for example, for its work on a recently concluded presidential search at Ohio State University.
Mr. Funk acknowledged that the high pay he earns can lead to tough questions about whether he is helping or hurting the search process.
“There is an intrinsic suspicion on the part of some constituents of the search firm that somehow the search firm is being paid by the board or by the university, and hence their views and visions are skewed,” he said. “I wouldn’t have survived in this business for 30 years if that were the case.”