In their searches for their institutions’ next leaders, governing boards at public colleges have the task of both attracting the best candidates and keeping the public in the know. And that can often be a game of tug-of-war.
College leaders and trustees say confidentiality is key because open searches deter quality candidates. Many faculty, students, and others who are open-government advocates say that it’s their democratic right to be part of the process and that openness inspires confidence in the choice of leader.
The debate over the presidential search process is re-emerging in many states. In Louisiana two lawsuits have challenged the way the state’s flagship university conducted its most-recent search. The suits, brought by a student journalist and two newspapers, argue that Louisiana State University violated the state’s public-records law by withholding the names of candidates for its top job. In other states, like Wyoming and Tennessee, legislatures have grappled with whether to alter public-records laws to make university searches open or closed.
At the same time, more and more universities are finding ways to make their searches for top leaders increasingly confidential.
The number of closed searches at public institutions has steadily grown over the past two decades, says Jan Greenwood, a search consultant for Greenwood/Asher and Associates, Inc.
“Those of us who have been in the business long enough know when the bell rang,” she says. “Private research universities were doing confidential searches, and in the early 90s, it spread to the public research universities. It then spread to the regional publics.”
The move toward confidentiality, she says, was spurred by the spread of stories about the unintended consequences of open searches. One public-university president told his peers he was fired because he had expressed interest in running a different college. Another president told people that he lost a $10-million donation for his institution because an alumnus thought the leader wasn’t dedicated.
Those stories created a domino effect—more candidates hesitated to apply in public searches, more universities tried to resolve those concerns by closing the shades, and more people started paying attention to the way searches were run.
Twenty years ago, Ms. Greenwood says, her firm could place 50 calls to potential candidates for a presidential search at a public institution and guarantee a list of 20 superb candidates who were willing to go public about their candidacy within two weeks. A decade later, the firm would have to make about 150 calls to gain a group of 15 to 20 top candidates who would agree to have their names made public. Now, she says, she is making between 450 and 700 calls to find three to five top contenders who will participate in an open search.
As a result of the increased reluctance among candidates to be publicly named, search committees and boards are working to make their processes more attractive, Ms. Greenwood says, and that often means finding a way to ensure some level of confidentiality.
“One university we’ve worked with over the years recently chose to interview in a confidential search process,” she said. “They interviewed 19 successful university presidents, and each of those presidents said they would not be in that search if it were public.”
F. King Alexander, who was named the sole finalist for the job of chancellor and systemwide president of Louisiana State University in March, told The Daily Reveille, the student newspaper, that he would not have applied to the Louisiana position if he had not been granted anonymity. Mr. Alexander, the departing president of California State University at Long Beach, was not made available by Cal State or by LSU for comment.
Staying Secret
One common argument for confidentiality is that open searches deter the most-prestigious candidates because they are most likely to worry about how exposure could prompt backlash at their current campuses.
In some cases people get the cold shoulder at their home institutions when they apply elsewhere, says Richard H. Wells, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. In his 13 years as the university’s top leader, he says, he has shown serious interest in half a dozen positions and been publicly announced as a finalist in four searches for top jobs at other campuses.
Before his name would be made public, he says, he would inform his board and cabinet. He followed that with a campuswide memorandum explaining the situation.
“The way you craft that is important,” he says. “It can’t be long and self-serving. You just have to be honest. I said, ‘This is a good opportunity to look at. It doesn’t mean I’m unhappy.’”
He also redoubled his work efforts at Oshkosh to prove he was still dedicated to his role.
“You’re in this limbo period, and it gets a little awkward here and there, but I didn’t hide,” he says. “I worked even harder when I was a candidate to make sure people understood I was still doing my job with as much energy as I had ever had.”
Even with the extra effort, there is sometimes tension, he says, especially if a person expresses interest in another position and then it doesn’t work out. For example, Mr. Wells was named one of three finalists, alongside Mr. Alexander, for the presidency at California State University at Long Beach in 2005. Within a year, he also was named a finalist at the College of Charleston.
When he returned to Oshkosh, he “had to take a lot of people to lunch,” he said, with a laugh. Mr. Wells tried to fix strained relationships with both faculty members and donors. “But it worked out. I mean, I’m still here.”
Sometimes presidents who are named finalists receive more praise than criticism. William L. Jenkins, LSU’s interim president and chancellor, previously served as the chancellor and the system president, and once before as the interim for the combined positions. In 2003, when he was acting as the system president, Mr. Jenkins was named a finalist at the University of Florida.
“Peculiarly, I felt I represented LSU in a way,” he says. “If you’ve been recruited by a first-class university, it reflects well on the institution you’re serving.”
Going public in a search is a legitimate concern for candidates, says Kelly B. McBride, a senior faculty member of ethics, reporting, and writing at the Poynter Institute, an organization designed to promote effective journalism. But it’s perhaps an even bigger concern for the general public.
“Most people who care about education in a given state care about this process,” she says, “and that’s everybody.” At some point, she adds, the public needs to see what the process looked like so that they can have faith in the committees making the decisions. And the choice of leader is important, given the influence university presidents have.
“The jobs are very much tied to our American sense of equality in a democracy,” she says. “We have these public institutions available to us because we believe in equal opportunity. The people who run these universities are charged with carrying out an important democratic function.”
They are also highly paid, she says, including with taxpayer dollars. The median total compensation for public-college leaders in 2011-12 was just over $441,000, according to The Chronicle’s annual survey.
The decision about how open to make a presidential search, though, is not an “all-or-nothing proposition,” she says. And a certain level of confidentiality, such as limiting the names that are made public to a handful of finalists, is a reasonable way to strike a balance among the needs of the public, the university, and the candidates.
Some public universities, though, go too far, she says, including those that create finalist pools of one, as LSU did with Mr. Alexander. In those cases, she says, there’s no room for public input; the decision has been made.
‘Logic Gymnastics’
The laws about how open presidential searches must be vary by state. Some states, like Michigan and New Mexico, allow public-college searches to remain confidential or have specific exemptions for keeping the names of the candidates secret until a certain point in the process. Others, like Florida and Louisiana, have laws that require many specific documents and pieces of information to be made public.
But even in states with the most open of laws, there is some gray area about how much colleges really must disclose, says Scott L. Sternberg, a New Orleans lawyer who recently represented a student journalist who asked the LSU Board of Supervisors to turn over the names of its presidential candidates.
The board’s search committee, acting through the LSU Foundation, a private arm of the university, had contracted with R. William Funk and Associates, a Dallas-based consulting firm, to conduct a search in which the names of the applicants and interviewees would remain private until a single finalist was recommended.
The search committee identified about 35 candidates, then reduced its list to 10, three of whom were interviewed in “neutral locations by less than a quorum of the search committee,” W. Shelby McKenzie, lead legal counsel to the board, said in an e-mail. The interviews, for which the board was not required to give public notice because of the low number of board members present, were confidential, mutual exchanges of information without commitment by the applicant to apply for the LSU position, Mr. McKenzie wrote.
“After the initial interviews, the search-committee chairman advised one of the candidates that, if he would accept the LSU position if offered, LSU wanted him to come to Baton Rouge to meet with other members of the committee and the board,” he wrote. “The day after all the committee members had the opportunity to meet F. King Alexander, he was recommended by the search committee to the LSU Board as the committee’s sole recommendation.”
After the search was completed, three lawsuits were filed against LSU seeking the names of the 35 people initially identified as candidates. Two of the lawsuits, filed by the Capital City Press LLC and NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune, were consolidated. The third was filed by the student editor of The Daily Reveille, the campus newspaper. Both were filed in the 19th Judicial District Court, but they yielded different results.
In the Capital City Press case, the judge ruled the names had to be turned over. In the student’s case, a different judge found that Mr. Alexander was the only formal applicant, and that, therefore, LSU did not violate the Louisiana Public Records Act.
LSU is working to appeal the decision involving the consolidated lawsuit, Mr. McKenzie said.
The split in the decisions shows the loopholes in the open-records law, Mr. Sternberg said.
“It’s logic gymnastics,” he said. “If someone sends a résumé in and is interested in learning more, does that make them an applicant? I think it does.”
Ms. Greenwood, who has helped facilitate more than 1,000 searches in her 21 years of consulting, says it’s difficult to strike a balance between the legitimate needs a candidate has for confidentiality and the public’s right to know. A ground rule of every search, she says, is to “do no harm to any candidate or university.”
“I see university attorneys working harder to be sure they match not only the requirement of the law,” she says, “but the spirit of the law as well.”
