Parker Executive Search found itself somewhere it didn’t want to be several times this past year: in the spotlight.
The firm came under scrutiny in September after the Iowa Board of Regents hired J. Bruce Harreld, a former IBM executive and part-time instructor at Harvard University, as president of the University of Iowa.
The firm has professionalized hiring and injected more secrecy, too.
Faculty, staff, and students were largely critical of Mr. Harreld’s lack of experience in higher education, and they questioned how the search firm had allowed him to submit a résumé with obvious errors and omissions. Mr. Harreld had listed himself as “managing principal” of a defunct LLC and had failed to list co-authors for his scholarly publications.
Just a month earlier, the firm was in the news after Norwood Teague, athletic director at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, admitted to sexually harassing two female employees and then resigned.
Minnesota administrators blamed Parker, which handled the university’s search for an athletic director in 2012, for not disclosing a gender-discrimination lawsuit filed against Mr. Teague by the women’s basketball coach at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was then athletic director. Parker officials noted that the lawsuit was filed after Mr. Teague had been picked for the job at Minnesota, disputing that they made any error.
Parker is also the firm that Eastern Michigan University hired to help it find a new president. That search has angered many faculty members, who say they have been shut out of the process; the 10-member search committee included only one faculty member. In November, after the trustees refused to make the search public, the Faculty Senate voted to withdraw the one faculty member from the committee.
Laurie C. Wilder, president of Parker, said that she could not discuss individual searches, but that the firm’s client institutions are entirely responsible for choosing the process for their searches as well as the participants.
While firms like Parker don’t make those decisions, they enjoy a growing influence in higher education, both in how searches are conducted and in who is eventually chosen.
Search firms say they provide advice and insight to make sure that colleges get leaders that fit their particular needs. Most important, Ms. Wilder says, Parker recruits people who may not be actively seeking a new job, so that client institutions have a broader pool of candidates. “We are in a war for talent right now in higher education,” she says, “and you have to be proactive.”
Trustees and other campus administrators turn to these companies to professionalize the search process and, in some cases, to make sure it’s confidential, arguing that high-quality candidates will not join an open search because it may alienate them in their current jobs.
Over the past two decades, it has become common for private companies to help fill top leadership positions, such as president and provost, says James H. Finkelstein, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who studies the compensation of college presidents. Colleges now use search firms to help fill other positions, too, including senior vice presidents, student-services professionals, even academic deans.
Mr. Finkelstein is among those who are critical of the use of search firms in academe. These observers say the companies contribute to secrecy in searches and undermine shared governance by shutting faculty members out of the process. The secrecy is particularly problematic at public colleges, they say, excluding taxpayers from discussions about who will run their state institutions.
The companies recommend not just confidential searches, which may produce a small group of public finalists, Mr. Finkelstein believes, but entirely secret searches as well, in which no candidates are announced until someone is hired. And the firms often employ former college executives, who may recruit former peers, resulting in a less-diverse field of candidates than might be considered by a large group of faculty members, he adds.
Frank D. LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, says boards may prefer to hire search firms precisely because their operations and the records they create are not subject to states’ open-records laws.
“There’s no question that presidential searches are increasingly being built around secrecy as the primary objective,” he says. “Searches these days are designed to produce the most secret president rather than the best-suited one.”
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
Correction (12/14/2015, 7:46 a.m.): This article originally misstated the affiliation of Professor Finkelstein. He is at George Mason University, not George Washington University. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
