Mississippi’s Chancellor Search Provoked a Fury. Will It Change Anything?

Yet another campus-leadership search is provoking a widespread backlash. This time, it’s at the University of Mississippi, where the institution’s board picked a new chancellor who had been paid as a consultant for the very search that resulted in his hiring.

Glenn Boyce didn’t submit an official application and wasn’t among the candidates that the board formally brought in for interviews last week. And he went through a much shorter vetting process than most chancellor hopefuls. Just after his last-minute interview on Thursday, he got the job.

On Friday, there were protests. Students and faculty members disrupted the news conference where the university planned to announce Boyce as the new chancellor, and some were forcibly removed by the police. The university then canceled the news conference.

When executive searches conclude in haphazard ways, colleges can face bad press and potential ramifications. But their boards appear increasingly confident in their ability to skirt the rules, said James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University who has studied campus-leadership trends.

“Governing boards just seem to be willing to do whatever they want to do,” Finkelstein said. Even if there are policy requirements for faculty participation in a leadership search, or state laws requiring that finalists’ names be made public, he said, “governing boards seem to think that these rules are just advisory.”

That’s partly a result, he believes, of more public-university board members having corporate or political backgrounds — and without much understanding of shared governance. Board spots are becoming “patronage positions” for politicians, he said. “They see these presidencies, or chancellor of a university, as plums — these are big positions for lots of money,” he said.

Sometimes, newspapers will sue college boards to release the names of finalists for presidencies or chancellorships. But those lawsuits can take years to play out, Finkelstein said.

He said the approach of many board members has been: “So sue me.”

The Role of the Accreditor

One potential consequence board members can face for suspicious searches: scrutiny from accreditors. Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on College — Mississippi’s accreditor — said in an interview with The Chronicle that she hadn’t yet reviewed potential accreditation problems with the university’s chancellor-selection process.

“If they didn’t follow their own policies,” Wheelan said, “that would be a violation of our standards.” Having a paid consultant emerge as a candidate is not unheard of, she said. “We don’t have anything that says it’s unethical to do,” she said.

The university’s policies spell out an “expedited” process that boards can use for chancellor searches — to consider “internal candidates” or “such other candidates that the board believes should be considered” — but say that such a process must begin early on, before a search firm is hired. The shortened process that landed on Boyce began once the search was already underway.

Wheelan announced on Monday that the accreditor, known as SACS, had begun an investigation into another university’s controversial leadership search. The University of South Carolina’s selection of Lt. Gen Robert L. Caslen Jr. will be reviewed this fall amid concerns about potential “undue influence,” according to a letter from Wheelan. One of the accreditor’s standards is the “absence of undue influence from external sources.”

In July, South Carolina’s governor called members of the university’s board and urged them to back Caslen. Despite an outcry over what many saw as a sham process swayed by political interference, the board voted 11 to 8 to appoint Caslen.

Right after the decision, Wheelan sent a letter to the University of South Carolina asking officials to defend their compliance with SACS standards. In that case, Wheelan told The Chronicle, the accreditor had decided to step in after news-media reports about the governor’s phone calls to board members.

A formal complaint could also prompt SACS to take a closer look at an institution’s presidential search, she said. That was the case when Kennesaw State University hired Georgia’s former attorney general as president, even though he had little experience working in higher education. (He lasted just 16 months in the job.)

In addition to “undue influence” and not following policies, Wheelan said the main accreditation problems in presidential searches surface when institutions hire leaders who lack qualifications and when boards display a lack of “integrity,” which SACS explains in its standards: “The principle serves as the foundation of a relationship in which all parties agree to deal honestly and openly with their constituencies and with one another.”

But not everyone feels that accreditors should weigh in on boards’ decision making, Wheelan said. At the most recent meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the federal body that advises the Education Department about accreditation, one committee member criticized the SACS review of the University of South Carolina’s search and asked a department official to “address that kind of overreach.”

Despite a flurry of news coverage, Wheelan doesn’t think there’s been an uptick in irregular presidential searches. “It ebbs and flows,” she said. “If there’s a candidate that a new governor coming in wants, sometimes they’ll short-shrift the system.”

If SACS decided to penalize Mississippi for its chancellor search, she said, she suspected the consequence wouldn’t go “beyond a warning.”

Beyond accreditor scrutiny, colleges and boards could face other consequences for controversial searches. At South Carolina, the university’s largest donor voiced her opposition to how the presidential search had played out, said Judith A. Wilde, chief operating officer at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, and Finkelstein’s research partner on campus-leadership trends.

‘They’ve Rolled Their Dice’

Boyce was selected by the board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, which oversees the state’s public colleges. As Wilde sees it, the board members are “at a point now where they’ve rolled their dice, and they’re going to have to live with the situation for a while.”

Raymond D. Cotton, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who negotiates contracts between presidents and governing boards, said it’s not wise for boards to ram through a candidate in secret and cut faculty members out of the search process. “These types of situations will metastasize, and they will get worse,” Cotton said.

“If they do this in the dark, they’re not going to know what the faculty thinks, and they may end up with an unpleasant surprise the next day, when the appointment is announced,” he said. “That does not help the university.”

The outcry over the selection of Boyce, Finkelstein said, “should be viewed as a cautionary tale by others who are looking at hiring presidents at major institutions.” The level of pushback shows, he said, “that students and faculty are becoming more engaged, and they’re willing to speak out more forcefully on these issues.”

Still, Finkelstein said, the trends he’s been seeing in presidential searches are less transparency and a diminished role for faculty members. The heightened involvement of search firms, he said, has also led to more-secretive processes. More often, members of campus search committees are required to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Finkelstein also pointed out that Bruce Harreld’s contract was just renewed at the University of Iowa, even after a heated outcry over the search that resulted in his selection, in 2015, and a vote of no confidence in the board by the university’s Faculty Senate.

“Many of these governing boards or administrators wear a vote of no confidence as a badge of honor,” he said. “They’ve stood up to the faculty.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.