U. of Minnesota’s Presidential Search Provokes Key Question: What’s Behind Door No. 2?

As Joan T.A. Gabel criss-crosses Minnesota this week, holding public forums on the University of Minnesota’s five campuses, the primary question on people’s minds will be whether she has what it takes to be the system’s next president. But so too looms another question: Is she as strong a candidate as the secret applicants we’ll probably never hear about?

Gabel, provost of the University of South Carolina at Columbia, was named last week as the sole public finalist for Minnesota’s presidency — a plum position at a top-tier public research institution that attracted dozens of applicants. Among three leading candidates, Gabel was the only one willing to be publicly named, with or without the other finalists. Her backers on the university’s board cited Gabel’s openness as one reason to move her forward in the process, leaving two other mystery candidates theoretically waiting in the wings if she fails to secure the job after extensive public interviews.

Minnesota’s quirky process is another illustration of the tensions between privacy and transparency in presidential searches at public institutions, where applicants’ fears about professional exposure are often pitted against the desire for an open vetting of multiple candidates. Minnesota and other states have tried to strike a balance, with laws that give universities some capacity to vet applicants in private while allowing for some level of public engagement. But the result is often a process that satisfies no one.

In Minnesota concerns abound. A board’s most important job is to hire a president, and Minnesota’s regents hope to fulfill that weighty responsibility by interviewing just one candidate. On top of those limits, one regent told The Chronicle on Monday that he believes the board’s leaders violated open-meetings laws, at least in spirit, by holding private conversations with leading applicants. David J. McMillan, the board’s chairman, disputes this.

The process that Minnesota followed is familiar to institutions trying to thread the needle between openness and secrecy. A 23-member presidential-search advisory committee reviewed 67 applicants, interviewed nine of them, and referred three names to the regents for consideration. The fruit of that four-month process was the nomination of a single person for the job, allegations of legal violations, the firing of a search firm that took on a competing client, and many dashed hopes about the deep vetting of a diverse pool of candidates.

In other words, as one search-committee member told the board last week, “the process worked.”

Regent Says Law Was Skirted

Abdul M. Omari, a regent and chairman of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee, said that the group had sought from the outset to balance confidentiality with openness.

“We have been committed to making it as transparent as legally possible, and for a lot of people that’s not enough,” Omari said.

Under Minnesota law, a candidate’s name is not made public until the applicant becomes a “finalist,” a designation given to those who are selected for final interviews with the Board of Regents. The law allowed the advisory committee, which included three board members, to privately vet and interview candidates before forwarding the three names to the full board. Ideally, all three would have been amenable to being named as finalists. But that isn’t how it turned out.

Only Gabel agreed to be identified publicly, forcing the board to consider whether naming one finalist among the committee’s recommendations was preferable to pressing for additional nominations. Faced with those options, the board voted 11 to 1 to name Gabel the sole finalist.

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The committee did not rank the candidates, but Omari told The Chronicle on Monday that Gabel was the consensus front-runner.

“It was very clear coming out of the committee that Joan Gabel was No. 1,” said Omari, who proposed naming her the finalist. “We just also got lucky that she was willing to go public.”

Minnesota is a complex university system that enrolls nearly 52,000 students at its flagship Twin Cities campus and employs about 26,000 people across the state.

Darrin M. Rosha, the lone dissenter, said he was voting against a process that he found inherently flawed to choose a leader with such immense responsibility. The board never should have been put in such an untenable position, he said.

“We should have been asking people whether they were willing to be part of our public process,” Rosha said, “because that is the law in our state.”

Most troubling to Rosha is that the regents had unequal access to the candidates, who met privately with board members on the committee and with the regents’ leadership. All told, the leading candidates met with five of the board’s 11 members during the closed portion of the process.

“I don’t think it complies with the law,” Rosha said. “It certainly doesn’t comply with the spirit of the law.”

The advisory committee spoke with nine unnamed candidates at a hotel near the Twin Cities airport, asking each of them the same 11 questions in interviews that ran about 75 minutes. After that, the board’s chairman and vice chairman met with the candidates as well.

McMillan, the board’s chairman, said that the conversations with board leaders lasted an average of 20 minutes and mostly served to thank the candidates for their interest. They were not, he insisted, “interviews.”

“If I’m a candidate for the top job at an institution the size, scope, and scale of the University of Minnesota, I’d sure like to know that the chair of the board is interested and cares enough to at least find time to meet me,” said McMillan, a former executive at Minnesota Power.

In addition to those meetings, McMillan said, he flew with Omari to “mostly neutral sites” to have meals with three of the candidates whom the committee had selected for “final vetting.” McMillan’s primary goal, he said, was to persuade the candidates to be considered as public finalists.

“I must not be a very good salesman,” McMillan said.

To Rosha, who is a lawyer, that level of private interaction between regents and candidates runs afoul of Minnesota case law on open meetings and could be challenged in court. Past rulings have found, for example, that serial meetings of less than a quorum of a public body could violate the law if designed to avoid a public hearing.

“I certainly wouldn’t want to have to defend that,” Rosha said.

McMillan insisted that Minnesota’s process has been aboveboard.

“We did not violate the law in spirit or in fact,” he said. “We would never have put together a process that would have done that.”

Usually a Done Deal

Presidential searches at Minnesota have a history of controversy, including its most recent one. Eric W. Kaler, then provost of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was hired in 2010 not long after he emerged as the sole public finalist.

Open-government watchdogs and news-media organizations criticized the process as insufficiently transparent.

Aware of past skepticism, McMillan has been at pains to emphasize that Gabel isn’t a shoo-in for the job. But in practice a sole finalist almost always wins out.

“To my knowledge, there has not been an example where one did not get appointed,” said Jan Greenwood, an executive-search consultant with Greenwood/Asher & Associates Inc.

Critics of closed presidential searches often blame search firms, which frequently advise boards that the best candidates will come forward only if promised confidentiality. No one wants to risk a current job, the thinking goes, to apply for a new one.

Minnesota initially retained Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates, a national search firm. But the board fired the firm in October, after learning that Storbeck/Pimentel had also taken on the presidential search at Michigan State University, which Minnesota saw as a direct competitor. Minnesota then retained AGB Search, a subsidiary of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

Students and faculty members at Michigan State, which has been in the throes of a high-profile sexual-assault scandal involving a former sports doctor, have criticized the search process there as well, lamenting the board’s decision to keep the candidates’ names confidential.

The desire to make searches private, particularly in states with legal requirements for transparency, can invite all manner of chicanery. Before the University of Florida hired W. Kent Fuchs as president, for example, members of the search committee met with him privately 100 miles away from the campus and reserved a hotel room for him under an alias, a Chronicle investigation found.

R. William (Bill) Funk, a search consultant, said he had seen “many many times” that candidates would consent to be publicly named only if they were the sole finalists. While there is still some risk of being passed over, Funk said, candidates are typically given informal assurances that they are expected to get the job.

“I don’t want to call it backroom stuff,” Funk said, “but usually there’s a lot of discussion before they get to that point.”

If selected, Gabel would be the first woman to lead the University of Minnesota. She would break another recent precedent, too. Minnesota has had four presidents in the past two decades, all of whom previously served as provosts of public universities with membership in the Association of American Universities, a group of elite research institutions. Gabel would be the first Minnesota president in at least a generation not to come from that cohort.

The smart money is on Gabel, but the regents have said that they could go back to the other top candidates if things do not work out. Still, Michael D. Hsu, a regent, expressed some skepticism at last week’s board meeting about the willingness of runners-up to come forward later.

“Now that we’ve stated who our top candidate is, I don’t think they’re going to be coming to Minnesota,” he said, “unless they really want the frequent-flier miles.”

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