How a Nagging Detail Plays Out in a Presidential Search

Shirley M. Collado’s no-contest plea to a charge of sexual abuse 17 years ago is a matter of public record, and the charge was known to the search committee and Board of Trustees that hired her to take over last year as president of Ithaca College. But an article in the campus newspaper that made the case known to the wider college community landed like a bombshell and ignited a public controversy.

Is the revelation that Ms. Collado was convicted of a misdemeanor count of sexual abuse an indictment of the often-secretive presidential-search process, wherein only a tiny fraction of stakeholders evaluates candidates? Or is it a communication issue, wherein a college and its leadership, despite what may have been good intentions, were not transparent enough about a decision?

Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Closed presidential searches have become the rule rather than the exception in higher education in recent decades in part because candidates, and search firms, prefer them. Potential new presidents may not want to jeopardize the stability of their current position through a public announcement that they are seeking new ones. “Bottom line is it impacts the quality of the pool,” says Shelly Weiss Storbeck, managing partner of Storbeck/Pimental & Associates, an executive-search firm that works with colleges.

Search firms, on the other hand, want to be able to present every candidate “as being fresh,” says James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University who studies college-leadership searches. “Most people don’t want to hire someone else’s rejects.”

Ms. Collado was hired to replace Tom Rochon, who retired in 2017. He stepped down as Ithaca’s president in the wake of protests over racial incidents and campus climate, and votes of no confidence. As the search for his replacement got underway, both the Student Government Association and a group of faculty wrote open letters urging the college to conduct an open search, with input from the campus. But in December 2016, the search committee announced that the process would be confidential.

Ms. Collado had served as executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, and as executive vice president of the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income students get scholarships to elite universities. Ms. Collado, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, had also entered a no-contest plea in 2001 to a misdemeanor charge of sexually abusing a psychiatric patient with whom she was working. She has denied any wrongdoing and says she entered the plea under legal advice in order to dispose of the charge at a difficult personal time.

She disclosed the conviction to the search committee and to the Board of Trustees, which hired her in early 2017. She publicly acknowledged the incident, albeit without specifics, in an interview conducted by the college shortly after she was hired. Representatives for Spencer Stuart, the firm that conducted the search, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Those specifics, once revealed in the newspaper article, have resisted being glossed over by a statement of continued support for Ms. Collado from the board that hired her.

Mr. Finkelstein believes that the current controversy might have been avoided, or minimized, in an open search. “There is no better vetting process available than the faculty grapevine,” he says. Thanks to the personal and professional networks that connect faculty across institutions, someone might have known about, and raised, Ms. Collado’s past as a subject to discuss before she was hired: “That would have at least given the campus community an opportunity to weigh in on this whether someone with this kind of background early in their career was appropriate to lead their college.”

‘No Surprises’ Preferred

Leaders who arrive with baggage are nothing new in higher education. Evan S. Dobelle, for example, left behind questions about expenditures during his time as president of the University of Hawaii system, then sparked new questions about expenditures during an ill-fated stint as president of Westfield State University in Massachusetts that ended in 2013. Reports about the drug-fueled exploits of Carmen A. Puliafito, who resigned two years ago as dean of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, raised questions for many in higher education about whether the processes used to vet campus leaders were rigorous enough.

Eliminating candidates because of past legal issues is not necessarily up to search firms. Mr. Finkelstein has examined about 60 contracts between colleges and search firms as part of his research, and only about 10 percent of the contracts specified that the companies will do criminal-background checks as part of their work.

But that doesn’t mean that no one is looking. Jan Greenwood, president of Greenwood/Asher & Associates, an executive-search firm that works with colleges, says that while her company does not do criminal-background searches itself, she and her colleagues typically advise clients to hire separate firms to handle that work. When searching for new presidents, she says, colleges “almost always” pay for detailed vetting of finalists, or conduct it in-house.

Ms. Storbeck, the search consultant, says it’s in everyone’s best interest, including the search firm’s, if there are “no surprises for the committee, and no surprises for the candidate.” Any candidate she works with who becomes a finalist for a president’s job is scrutinized on his or her record of criminal and civil litigation and military service, as well as references, press and social-media track record, and other areas. Some colleges now ask for psychological assessments as well, she says.

In her career, Ms. Greenwood has ruled out one presidential candidate who turned out not to have earned a required terminal degree and another who had conducted an affair with a board member’s wife. But a mere criminal conviction “does not knock them out,” she says. If a candidate tries to hide something potentially damaging, that ruins their credibility, she says. But if they are forthcoming about potential sources of concern, she says, “we always encourage the candidate to talk directly with the chair of the committee or the hiring authority, to describe the situation and have a conversation on it, and then make a decision from there.”

It remains to be seen whether the attention paid to Ms. Collado’s past will wane or intensify, but the fate of her presidency may prove more telling about how decision makers at colleges communicate than how search firms do their jobs. While Ms. Collado publicly acknowledged the incident at the start of her tenure, it clearly was not enough to keep the wider college community from an unpleasant surprise. That may be especially costly these days, when even a small misstep or exposed foible can go viral and do permanent reputational damage to leaders and institutions.

In her search work, Ms. Greenwood says she sometimes runs into “issues that need to be explained” — some aspect of a candidate’s life or résumé that might raise questions. When such issues come up, the college has some questions to ask itself. “Is the strategy to get out in front of the story, or to react to the story?” she says. “I tend to lean toward the side of: Get out in front of it. Explain it, and see where things fall out.”

Correction (1/19/2018, 7:56 a.m.): This article originally stated that half of the contracts James Finkelstein studied revealed that search firms would do criminal background checks. The correct number is 10 percent. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.