In Search for College Chiefs, Faculty Input Can Feel Like a Mere Formality

In January 2014, Donald L. White and a few of his faculty colleagues at Kent State University gathered for an event with the trappings of great import.

Mr. White, a mathematics professor, had been summoned to Rockwell Hall for an emergency meeting of the Committee on Administrative Officers, a group empowered by university policy to interview all of the finalists for major administrative posts. But as the committee began its questioning of Beverly J. Warren, a candidate for the university’s presidency, Mr. White could not help noticing a frenzy of activity outside the door. As it turned out, a nearby room was being readied for a big announcement: Kent State’s board had already selected Ms. Warren to be the university’s next leader.

A few minutes later, the board whisked Ms. Warren off for a grand presidential unveiling.

“I guess by the letter of the law we were able to interview that candidate,” Mr. White says. “It was an interview, but it was a pointless interview.”

Faculty members were represented on Kent State’s presidential-search committee, but other groups, including the committee on which Mr. White served, never learned the names of the finalists for the job or had an opportunity to give input to the board.

It is processes like those, now commonplace at public and private universities, that feed the impression that the solicitation of professors’ input in presidential searches is little more than pageantry.

In a system where governance is said to be shared, no process is as potentially fraught as the selection of a new leader. College trustees seem to agree that professors deserve to have their voices heard in some way, but there is wide variation about what that really means when working toward a decision that is decidedly a governing board’s to make.

Debates over the appropriate role of faculty members in presidential searches are hardly new, but arguments over the subject have been particularly acute of late. At the University of Iowa, for example, professors say their concerns were ignored when the board recently selected J. Bruce Harreld, a businessman with a thin academic résumé, as Iowa’s next chief. Elsewhere, in Michigan and Delaware, professors say they are being locked out of the search process.

Friction Over Confidential Searches

Faculty members are routinely given a few slots on presidential-search committees, but professors often see such representation alone as insufficient. At Eastern Michigan University, for example, faculty leaders have said they will not be satisfied unless all of the finalists for the top job make public visits to the campus.

But the Eastern Michigan board seems dug in on a confidential search. Regents say that publicly naming finalists — as the university has done in the past — would deter quality candidates from coming forward, because it could jeopardize their current positions or undermine relations with donors back at their home institutions. That argument has not resonated with everyone, though.

“Faculty feel very strongly that this is a public university, not a private corporation, and that such a search should be open,” says Sandy Morey Norton, president of the Faculty Senate.

Discontent over the process threatens to fracture the Eastern Michigan search. A representative from the university’s All-Union Council, which includes members of the faculty union, recently resigned in protest from the Presidential Search Advisory Committee. If the senate encourages Ms. Norton to do the same, she says she will step down as well.

The search at Eastern Michigan comes on the heels of two presidencies that ended in controversy. Susan W. Martin, who resigned in July, had been reprimanded by the board for having an “inappropriate” alcohol-fueled exchange at a public event. Her predecessor, John A. Fallon III, was fired, in 2007, amid an outcry over the university’s bungled response to a student’s murder.

There is a lot of pressure to get this one right, and regents say a closed search provides the best chance of that.

Michelle R. Crumm, a member of the Eastern Michigan Board of Regents and chairwoman of the presidential-search committee, says she is prepared to give professors a greater say. Responding to criticism about the search, she has recommended that two more professors be added to the 10-member Search Advisory Committee, which would bring the total number of faculty members to three. Thus far, Ms. Crumm has not received a response from the senate.

“I’m pleading with them,” she says. “I really want your voice on the committee.”

But Ms. Crumm and her colleagues on the board are not open to what professors say they really want: full public vetting of finalists. In interviews with executive-search firms, Ms. Crumm says, the board was invariably told that an open search process would deter sitting presidents and provosts from participating.

Eastern Michigan has selected the firm of Parker Executive Search to assist with the process. The company, which is based in Georgia, has come under some scrutiny of late for its role in controversial searches, including the one in Iowa.

Parker has defended its work, and Ms. Crumm says she remains confident in the firm.

‘Trusting People to Be Sensible’

For a principle as bedrock as professors’ involvement in picking leaders, the origins of the concept are murky. But the answer rests somewhere between the beginnings of American higher education, when professors were often aspiring ministers with little power, and 1966, when the American Association of University Professors issued a statement on the matter.

“In earliest days, of course, going back to colonial America — Harvard, all the rest — there was no established faculty,” says William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and a co-author of Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. “The tradition of faculty participation in the selection of the president didn’t exist.”

Professorial participation in the process, Mr. Bowen says, rightfully emerged as the model of shared governance evolved. But that model, as the former president sees it, does not dictate that everyone on a campus should expect to question a handful of applicants in campuswide forums. Professors, Mr. Bowen says, ought to have enough faith in their colleagues to represent them effectively on search committees.

“Why,” he asks, “can’t leading candidates talk directly with leading faculty members without broadcasting the conversation to the world? It’s a matter of trusting people to be sensible.”

That view is shared by Donald J. Puglisi, a member of the University of Delaware’s Board of Trustees and co-chairman of that institution’s presidential-search committee. Mr. Puglisi, an emeritus professor in Delaware’s college of business, says the board has convened 19 focus groups and public forums to solicit broad input about the qualities professors and others want to see in a president. But the 15-member search committee, which includes four faculty members, was unanimous in its decision that finalists not be publicly named, Mr. Puglisi says.

“We have taken the input from faculty and staff and all of our stakeholders very, very seriously,” Mr. Puglisi says. “I don’t think it’s fluff. I don’t think it’s just for show. It’s not lip service to these groups.”

The decision to close the search has been met with opposition from Delaware’s Faculty Senate, which this month passed a resolution expressing “deep concern” about the confidentiality of the search process. Mark S. Parcells, a member of the senate, says the resolution was meant to send a message that faculty members believe a closed search is inconsistent with the principles of transparency and collaborative deliberation that are hallmarks of academe.

The resolution is “likely to have very little to no impact,” Mr. Parcells concedes. “But it’s a registration of our frustration with the process.”

Public-records laws in some states compel universities to open up their searches, and in other cases board members make the calculation that closing the process is simply not worth the fight. At the University of Wyoming, for example, trustees voted in May to release the names of all presidential finalists because doing anything else would invite lawsuits from news-media organizations.

Search consultants frequently argue that universities will lose out on quality candidates by opening up searches, but a countervailing argument suggests that a new president may not be set up for success if he or she is denied the opportunity to build a broad base of support during a campus visit.

“What I’m talking about is buy-in,” says Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. “You don’t want to start a term without the support of the people who are the key constituencies.”

The broader principle at stake, Mr. Scholtz argues, is that universities should uphold their values in every endeavor, particularly the search for a new leader. “We all recognize the board has the ultimate responsibility,” he says. “But we also recognize institutions are run most effectively when authority is shared, when decisions are transparent.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.