Presidential search committees at public colleges have two tasks: Find the best candidate, and keep the public informed.
It’s a classic Catch-22.
Professors, students, and taxpayers want to weigh in on the searches, but committees say they can’t always attract the best candidates if people are watching. That’s because when a search is public, whether by law or by choice, sitting presidents may hesitate to enter the competition, fearing backlashes on their current campuses.
Some governing boards and committees have tried to keep searches closed, but the general public and the news media aren’t keen to give up their right to know. And the problem is getting worse.
Presidential openings at many public colleges, even at top research universities, are drawing fewer qualified applicants as budgets get tighter and expectations increase. A generation of presidents is headed toward retirement, while provosts and other administrators are increasingly hesitant to step up to the lead role, further depleting the applicant pools. Additionally, technological improvements have made potential presidents wary of having their candidacies broadcast and archived online for anyone to see.
A recent open search at Florida State University attracted 26 candidates—none of them sitting presidents. Jan Greenwood, a search consultant, says that during an open search she conducted this year, the board interviewed just one sitting president from a comparable university, compared with the 17 a different college interviewed during a closed search.
The main challenge, Ms. Greenwood says, is that potential candidates are hearing more and more reports of presidents who look for positions elsewhere losing donations, trust, or their jobs, and they balk at putting themselves in the same position.
At the same time, as states face tremendous budget problems, regulation-minded lawmakers and taxpayers are increasingly concerned about who’s running public institutions. Some universities, limited by strict public-records, or “sunshine,” laws, have tried to perfect the art of the open search. But what’s best for the public isn’t always best for presidential candidates and governing boards, and eventually one of those groups might have to give some ground.
Turnover in Tennessee
Few universities have struggled more with the search process than the University of Tennessee system, which has conducted both extremely private and extremely public searches yet can’t find a president who lasts more than a few years.
The university has had three presidents over eight years. “And all of them,” says State Rep. Gerald McCormick, “have basically ended in disaster.”
In a closed hire in 2002, Tennessee selected John W. Shumaker to replace J. Wade Gilley, who served as president for two years before resigning amid accusations that he had had an improper relationship with a subordinate. Many hoped Mr. Shumaker could put the university back on track, but less than a year later, his presidency ended over financial and ethical scandals.
Some people argued that the meltdown could have been avoided if the search had been open and Mr. Shumaker had been publicly vetted.
When the system went looking for Mr. Shumaker’s replacement, the public and the news media pushed for an open search, and the governor agreed. The system hired John D. Petersen, to widespread applause. He got off to a good start, partially because the search process gave people a chance to get excited about his plans. But five years later, in 2009, Mr. Petersen stepped down after having lost the support of most faculty members.
Mr. Petersen had emerged as the best choice among the candidates in 2004. But what if better candidates didn’t apply because the search was so public?
In May, Representative McCormick, a Republican, proposed a bill to help answer that question. The legislation would have closed presidential searches, but Mr. McCormick quickly withdrew it because leaders at the university were hesitant to try to change the law.
“Their general attitude is, they would love to have it that way, but they didn’t feel like it would be worth the fight to get it changed,” he says.
It would certainly be a fight. Jan F. Simek, the system’s interim president, says faculty members appreciate openness in the process. And Jack McElroy, editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel, says that as long as the university is public, the media will make sure it is subject to open-meeting laws, regardless of how the process affects candidates.
As an analogy, he points to the mayor of Knoxville, who is running for governor.
“It raises questions of his attention to the duties of mayor and the future of his subordinates,” Mr. McElroy says. “But this is how our society has accepted the way this kind of position is handled, and people don’t feel that he’s a bad person or a poor leader. It’s simply understood that sometimes, this happens.”
Avoid the Sunlight?
That understanding might not extend to university presidents.
Some argue that the situation is different. Though both a mayor and a college president are public officers, the college president runs an institution that typically receives less than half of its money from the government.
And boards are not always understanding. When a dean is angling for a presidency at another university, colleagues and supervisors tend to be supportive, according to Rita Bornstein, an expert on higher-education leadership and president emerita of Rollins College. But if a president is looking elsewhere?
“It’s a good way to ruin the job you’re in,” Ms. Bornstein says. “Boards and faculties want to believe that you’re there for them and you’re in for the long haul, ... and that when you say you love the school, you really mean it.”
Luring sitting presidents is not a new problem, but presidential searches are getting tougher. Many say institutions aren’t doing a good job training provosts, deans, and other administrators for the presidency. At the same time, the job itself is becoming more demanding and more time-consuming as most state budgets shrink.
“Nobody wants a job that they’re going to fail at,” or one in which they will have to “spend all their time cutting,” says Theodore J. Marchese, a senior consultant with Academic Search Inc. “If you have an open process for an institution in distress, that’s two strikes.”
There’s also the problem of technology. An open interview used to mean that a candidate was in a room with trustees, professors, students, a few dozen people with some connection to the university, and the media. Now, everything the candidate says in that room will be recorded, broadcast online, and remain accessible to anyone who knows how to use Google.
“You’re more careful,” says Mary Jane Saunders, president of Florida Atlantic University, who was chosen through an open search process, including Webcast interviews, this past winter. “You might measure your words more than you might if it was an informal setting.” It wasn’t just the candidates who had to watch their words at Florida Atlantic—even the board’s deliberations were Webcast.
“It’s tough to do because you have to pose everything in a positive manner,” says Nancy Blosser, chair of the Board of Trustees. (Ms. Saunders says she has no plans to watch the video of the deliberations because, as she enters her new role, she doesn’t want to know who did or didn’t support her.)
Technology can also make a search more public when a candidate fails to get the job, given the ease of finding news articles online. Many candidates are starting to fear the stigma that comes with being rejected multiple times.
But some see benefits in giving much broader audiences a chance to view and participate in the process. Even before he or she is hired, a president gets to know the campus, and vice versa, which often makes for an easier transition. The public is more likely to trust the system, even if the new president is a bust.
Open but Speedy
At least, that’s the theory—it doesn’t always work so nicely.
To minimize the effects an open search can have on candidates, a number of universities keep the process short. Florida Atlantic released its list of candidates on February 16, and Ms. Saunders was chosen on March 4; the University of Tennessee intends to pick candidates who will be interviewed within a day or two of releasing the names of all applicants, and the board hopes to settle on a new president within two weeks.
But speed has drawbacks. “There’s not a lot of time for checking it out, seeing if you like the community, or anything like that before they make their decision,” Ms. Blosser says.
And open searches don’t necessarily shield boards from criticism.
At Florida Atlantic, about half of the 43 candidates waited until the last minute to officially apply, wanting to minimize the amount of time their names were public, Ms. Blosser says. That led members of the media and the faculty to assume someone was manipulating the search—even though the search was conducted in the sunshine. In the end, concerns were quelled when a popular candidate was selected.
Sometimes universities try to find ways around sunshine laws, and occasionally openness can encourage secret dealings.
“What can happen behind the scenes is that board members or search-committee members become enamored with a candidate who’s unwilling to go public, so you have some backroom things going on,” says R. William Funk, a longtime search consultant.
That can mean meeting candidates at airports or in other states, or holding small, informal gatherings that aren’t always subject to open-meetings laws.
At universities that keep searches confidential until finalists are picked—the strategy advised by most consultants—naming only one finalist can raise hackles. Sometimes it’s done because there really is only one good choice, but sometimes it’s because a candidate threatens to back out if he or she is not the only finalist.
The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities was accused of conducting backroom activities during its last presidential search, in 2002, when it hired Robert H. Bruininks. The university decided to keep the names of its finalists private. Newspapers in Minnesota filed a lawsuit demanding the release of the names, and the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled against the university.
Though Mr. Bruininks was an internal candidate, Maureen K. Reed, chair of the Board of Regents at the time of the search, says she thinks going public would have limited the number of applicants.
Ms. Reed also asks: With public financing dwindling, now accounting for far less than half of some universities’ revenue, how much does the public really need to know?
“It’s an interesting question,” says James L. Murphy III, vice chair of the University of Tennessee system’s Board of Trustees and chair of the current search committee. “When the state was funding 70 to 80 percent of the cost of higher education, our institution looked a whole lot like any other government entity. As they become a smaller and smaller funder, at some point you have to question whether we’re just a private institution with a little bit of public support, or we’re a public institution.”
But taxpayer money is still taxpayer money, no matter how much or how little is involved, says Mr. McElroy, of the Knoxville newspaper.
“If you want to be private, go ahead and be private, but don’t take public money,” he says. “If you want public money, then be accountable to the people you’re taking money from.”
Best Interests?
Ronald E. Weinberg, chair of the Board of Trustees at Cleveland State University, in Ohio, has been on both sides of the debate—he chaired the university’s presidential search in 2009, and has also owned newspapers.
Cleveland State decided to keep its search private, but the media got some applicants’ names before they were officially released. The remaining candidates demanded that their interviews be confidential. The trustees had to keep watch for reporters and sneak candidates in through back doors, Mr. Weinberg says, because that was the only way to get candidates to continue with the process. Cleveland State eventually hired Ronald M. Berkman, a former executive vice president and provost of Florida International University.
Mr. Berkman had applied for the presidency at Florida International, and several other universities, at the same time he applied to Cleveland State. Because of Florida’s strict sunshine laws, his name was made public in that search, but he insisted on privacy at Cleveland State. Of course, when Florida International asked him during a public interview if he had applied to any other positions, Mr. Berkman had to disclose his candidacy at Cleveland State.
“It’s unfortunate for higher education that presidential searches fall under the purview of open-records rules,” Mr. Weinberg says. “When you’re trying to interview a university president, the state and the state universities are not well served by the restrictions.”
He says universities should be able to do what’s in their best interest during a search.
“What has priority?” he asks. “Getting a great president, or letting the press be able to run the story a week and a half earlier?”
