A moment of silence, please, for the closed-door university presidential search, a failed experiment that’s about to draw its last breath. Cause of death: a hashtag.
The #MeToo movement signals the end of a lamentable era of darkness in which secrecy-obsessed headhunting firms dominated the selection of college presidents. It’s gone, and it won’t be missed.
Now that the pervasiveness of sexual harassment by people in positions of authority (and let’s face it, in this context “people” almost always means “men”) is universally known, everything about the presidential selection process is about to be rethought — starting with its confidentiality.
For many years, state open-government laws required state colleges and universities to give the public a role in the presidential selection process. The public was entitled, at a minimum, to see the names of the finalists with enough lead time to have input into the hiring decision. Since the finalists’ names would inevitably be disclosed, there was no reason not to invite them to visit the campus and meet with rank-and-file students, faculty, and staff, to guard against a personality mismatch.
But in recent years, headhunting firms have persuaded colleges and state legislators that the right amount of public input is zero. It has become commonplace for the public to meet new presidents only after their contracts have been signed. It’s possible for a university to hire a president who has never set foot on the campus, since cloak-and-dagger interviews are often conducted at distant airport hotels for extra secrecy.
Take Northern Illinois University, which in 2013 abandoned its practice of bringing presidential finalists to campus because an executive search firm convinced its trustees that superstar sitting presidents would not endure a public search. The process produced Doug Baker, neither a sitting president nor, as it turned out, a superstar; he was forced to resign after four years on the job when a scathing state audit report found that his administration skirted state ethics laws to issue no-bid six-figure contracts to consultants.
It is no surprise that secretive presidential searches held in defiance of state disclosure laws produce presidents with little regard for public accountability. How do they get around such state laws? Many universities cynically subvert statutes requiring the disclosure of presidential “finalists” by producing a finalist list of one, so that the public never knows whether the search was thorough or the pool of candidates diverse.
Even where the law clearly entitles the public to a transparent process, universities frequently shrug off their legal obligations, adopting a “go sue me” attitude, as the University of Arizona did in 2017, disregarding a state Supreme Court directive to make the names of finalists public, or Washington State University did in 2016, conducting a “public selection meeting” at which the finalists were described only by code names (“Candidates A, B, and C”).
At times, universities have gone through such extreme lengths to maintain secrecy that the quality of the search is compromised. For instance, when the University of Nebraska began searching for a president in 2014, its headhunting firm insisted that members of the search committee could never actually take possession of the candidates’ résumés, because that would turn the résumés into public records under state law. Instead, the members were loaned tablets loaded with the candidates’ applications, which were collected after each committee meeting and shipped back to the search firm’s California office — assuring that the committee members could not devote off-hours time to deeply evaluating the candidates.
More recently, at the University of Central Florida, the presidential headhunting firm held the application window open until the moment that the search committee convened. The result was that candidates could slide last-minute applications into the inbox, allowing no time for journalistic scrutiny or for committee members to give them anything but a perfunctory look.
The endless churn of short-term presidency after short-term presidency demonstrates that secret searches do not produce better presidents — they produce unaccountable presidents unprepared to function in a climate of scrutiny.
At the University of Missouri, a closed-door 2011 search produced a president with minimal higher-ed experience who had no current employer relationship to protect — he was between jobs after his software firm got bought out. Tim Wolfe lasted just four years before his presidency cratered amid campus racial tensions, an implosion that set back Mizzou’s recruitment and fund-raising for years.
One of the most secretive public universities, Michigan State University is also among the most scandal-ravaged. After battling in court for years to exclude the public from the presidential selection process, MSU elevated the in-house candidate Lou Anna Simon in 2005. A Michigan State lifer, Simon had never worked at an institution where public accountability is valued. It showed throughout her presidency, ended by allegations that MSU downplayed sexual misconduct by a now-convicted serial molester on the university’s medical faculty.
Secret searches produce unaccountable presidents unprepared to function in a climate of scrutiny.
At Ithaca College, where headhunters persuaded university trustees to renege on their promise of a publicly inclusive search, the public was shocked to learn from a newspaper investigation that their recently hired president had been charged with sexual abuse while working as a therapist. Members of the search committee claim to have thoroughly investigated the situation and satisfied themselves that Shirley Collado was the right choice — but there is no way for the public to know that, because the entire process took place behind closed doors.
The headhunter-fueled idea of the “superstar president” who will apply only if guaranteed total secrecy is an utter myth. In fact, secrecy more commonly benefits insider candidates like MSU’s Simon, able to slide into these coveted positions on the strength of their connections when an open, deliberative process might have exposed their weaknesses.
The benefits on the transparency side of the ledger are obvious: reassuring the community of the integrity of the hiring process, reaffirming the campus’s commitment to open government and the rule of law, avoiding a personality mismatch. The only counterbalancing consideration is sparing the applicants from loss of face with their current employers — which amounts to humoring the fantasy of alumni and trustees that their president would never consider a job anywhere else.
Reality check: The life span of a college presidency is about seven years. If your president has been in office for six years, he or she is entertaining other offers.
Consider the case of Louisiana State University, where trustees were so adamant about maintaining secrecy that they defied contempt-of-court sanctions rather than comply with a state statute requiring public disclosure of the final candidates. The eventual winner, F. King Alexander, insisted that he would not have competed in an open process. But why?
At the time, Alexander was only 49 years old, already on his second college presidency, and entering his eighth year at Cal State-Long Beach. Did the alumni and trustees at Long Beach State honestly believe that Alexander would stay 40 more years and die in office of old age?
When we protect the “right” of candidates to remain in the shadows up to the very moment of their hiring, all we are protecting is the right to lie — the prospective president’s ability to assure donors on their current campus “don’t worry, I’ll be here to watch over your $10 million,” and then go home and load up the moving van.
What has finally doomed the secret search is the dawning knowledge that higher education is filled, even at high levels, with sexual harassers. Not a month goes by without the revelation that another prominent college professor or administrator — Jorge Domínguez at Harvard, Sujit Choudhry at Berkeley, William Harris at Columbia — has been accused of abusive behavior toward women.
The closed-door search will thrash around a bit as it dies — searches already in progress under a guarantee of confidentiality cannot, realistically, be opened — but there will be few if any future hires without a rigorous background investigation that includes thoroughly checking with the candidate’s current employer.
Do you think it’s a remote proposition that a college would hire a harasser?
Consider the situation of Central Oregon Community College in 2014, when the institution came within days of appointing Patrick Lanning as its fifth president — only to learn that he was on administrative leave from his previous institution because of a colleague’s complaint that he sexually assaulted her at a convention hotel. COCC was spared a ruinous hire solely because Lanning’s name became public when he visited the campus as one of three finalists.
Public scrutiny of presidential finalists is indispensable because private headhunters rarely perform the thorough background checks that you would expect of them, given their six-figure compensation packages.
The George Mason University researchers James Finkelstein and Judith Wilde have reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and executive-search firms and found that headhunters rarely promise to perform basic due-diligence inquiries, such as running the candidates’ names through information databases or checking for involvement in litigation.
And now that long-buried instances of sexual misconduct are belatedly becoming public, even searching for lawsuits or arrests is inadequate. The only effective way to guard against appointing a president who may be crippled by previously unpublicized wrongdoing is to disclose the finalists’ names and make inquiries at their recent workplaces.
Once it has become universally standard practice to contact the finalists’ current employers, as it must soon be, the sole justification cited by headhunting firms — protecting the candidates’ standing back home — disappears. Without that justification, there is no reason not to bring the finalists to the campus to interact with the people they aspire to lead.
The secret search is a disappearing dinosaur, and with it the headhunting firms that refuse to adapt to a world in which more is demanded than “trust me.” Another hashtag making the rounds seems to apply to headhunters who resist thorough public vetting of presidential finalists: #TimesUp.
