For the last seven years I worked as an associate for an academic-search firm. One of my last tasks there was to defend the decision by a board of trustees to keep its presidential search confidential. This was not the only time I stood before angry faculty and staff members, in small conference rooms and large lecture halls, who looked at me as an interloper, a leech, and a symbol of all that had gone wrong with the academy.
My firm had no official position on how closed or open presidential searches should be. That is a decision made by boards. But until then I had a personal bias that an open search was no longer desirable in our social-media-saturated world. I had read the arguments in these pages and had heard from disgruntled faculty members at different institutions. But standing in a lecture hall while several professors told me that the rising tide of corporatism was sapping everything that makes a university great, I revisited all the arguments in my mind.
Since leaving the world of academic search, I have thought a lot more about it, and ultimately came out in this place: Faculty members should drop their demands that presidential candidates make their visits, and thus their candidacies, public.
The standard argument you have heard — that an open search will fail to attract the best candidates — is indeed true. If you spend just a few days trying to recruit a president, you will learn this. It is not some devious subterfuge meant to take power away from the faculty. But even more compelling is the weakness of the arguments for opening up the search to daylight.
Several faculty members insisted to me that they would by default distrust anyone so conniving as to make a campus visit and not dutifully inform his or her current employer. Such thinking has merit, but now that I am doing searches outside of academe, I see that it is a thought that can exist only within the warm bubble of tenure. Others suggested that if the process were not one that built confidence and buy-in with everyone (read: themselves), it would be illegitimate, and the faculty would not accept the result and would act accordingly.
One earnest and well-meaning professor told me that closed searches are just part of a trend, the latest assault on transparency at the university. He said that during the last presidential search, the finalists had made presentations to the full faculty — a practice he thought should happen again. But when I asked him whether the last administration had been transparent as a result of the open search, he admitted that it had had no effect.
But I give the faculty members I met with credit for not advancing perhaps the world’s worst argument for the open search, one made in these pages, which is that the faculty grapevine is the best way to vet candidates. No. The truth is that a vetting process run by cats would be better than one group of insiders asking another group of insiders for all the rumors and innuendo they have heard about one of the candidates. How would such methods, in any academic discipline, be considered sound? Perhaps those who make it into the professoriate are beings of such lofty morals and intellect that they are immune to the failings of humanity. Which is to say nothing of the inevitable social-media mob, the torchlights of which would flatter no candidate.
But it is a mistake for boards, search committees, or search firms to be too glib about these concerns. There is a lot of real anger and sadness around this issue, and it was apparent that what was really being defended there was not so much an effective and proven process but, rather, a ritual: Rites that previous generations had performed were being stripped from the protracted presidential-selection ceremony. These faculty members wanted their next potential presidents to prostrate themselves in a public visit so that, after an hour of talk and Q&A, the professors could pass judgment.
Yet, sadly for the faculty members, the decision was not theirs to make. So the process they wanted was empty. It would only make them feel good. It had no actual effect beyond psychological, spiritual, communal. And what kind of ritual would an open campus visit be exactly? Well, for one of the three candidates — the one who will get the job — it’s a rite of passage into the group and a coronation. But for the other two, who will return to their lives depleted, it is a ritual of sacrifice. These faculty members, I realized, wanted the applicants to want to be their president so badly that they would bleed professionally for it.
Faculty members also claw for their place at the table in a presidential search out of fear that the board will enter a black box and return with someone wholly unpalatable, like a politician or, gasp, a business person. The feeling is that an open visit, and the ability to raise holy hell afterward, would be a safeguard against such betrayal. It is not. If board members are willing to consider such a thing, they already know the faculty won’t like it and are prepared for the blowback.
If you want to avoid such folly, fight like hell about the composition of the search committees. Get a commitment on the number of faculty members, and put a limit on the number of board members, who will serve. Do it now, long before your current president gracefully retires, or is swept up in scandal, or jumps ship to another university.
Ultimately, after hearing the faculty’s ire in the search discussed above, the board did not change its tack on the public-visit question. The process was opened up to select groups, in a controlled fashion, across the institution. They decided on the phrase “confidential” rather than “closed,” which is really just marketing except in one key way: the relationship of the word “confidential” to the idea of “confidence.”
In my experience, faculty members at some institutions have some degree of confidence in parties other than themselves to make a good choice. Sure, there are always voices of dissent, and transitions give everyone stomachaches. But at those colleges, faculty members trust their representatives on the committee and understand that their thirst for knowledge and open discussion is of limited utility. Searches run more smoothly in these cases, committees and search firms can focus on the task at hand instead of quieting rebellions.
What kind of college or university has a faculty that consents to a secretive process and the loss of control over the selection of the leader, you ask? A healthy one.
Matthew Tzuker is a recruiting partner at Heller Search Associates.
