Wisconsin’s Search for a New President Has Just Begun. Faculty Already Fear the Worst.

After five tumultuous years, Raymond W. Cross is retiring as president of the University of Wisconsin system. While some faculty members are relieved to see Cross go, many of them feel more uneasy about who the Board of Regents might choose to replace him.

“It’s hard for anyone to think of positive change when we have a feeling of deep distrust,” said Nicholas Fleisher, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Cross is stepping down as the political climate in the state is shifting and the new governor, a Democrat, is voicing his support for higher education. But the regents who were appointed by the previous governor have a record of undermining faculty interests and shared governance, said Fleisher, who also leads the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The immediate concern for Fleisher and others is that the board has, so far, cut the faculty out of the process, appointing a small search committee stacked with regents and administrators.

The search for new leadership can be an opportunity for a campus or a system to bring a diverse set of views together around a positive, unified vision of the future. But critics see boards at many public universities seeming instead to act out of fear, by shrinking the circle of decision makers and shutting out or ignoring input from faculty, staff, and students.

Looking at the outcomes of recent searches in other states, some university employees in Wisconsin worry that their own regents will follow suit by stage-managing the search in order to fulfill a political agenda or bring in a president with a corporate background and little or no understanding of higher education.

Druscilla Scribner, a professor of political science at the Oshkosh campus, said too many boards now see higher education as a broken system that needs fixing rather than as an asset to the state.

“I worry that searches around the country have moved to being damage-control, rather than forward-looking,” she said. “That translates into promoting a business leader who will come in and cut expenses to solve the current issue. But it doesn’t solve the current issue.”

No Faculty Allowed

What Scribner and others in Wisconsin hope to avoid are searches like those recently completed in Mississippi and South Carolina that prompted protests from faculty and students alike.

In one case, the board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, which oversees the state’s public colleges, appointed Glenn Boyce as chancellor of the University of Mississippi, although he had not formally submitted an application or gone through the interview process. Boyce had actually been hired by the state’s governing board to help conduct the search for a new chancellor.

In the other case, the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina appointed Lt. Gen Robert L. Caslen Jr. to run the institution after being pressured by the state’s Republican governor.

“A successful search does not conclude with widespread backlash,” said Kathleen Dolan, a political-science professor at the Milwaukee campus.

So far, the regents at the University of Wisconsin system have done little to assuage faculty fears. The board appointed a nine-member committee to screen candidates and recommend finalists — half the size of such panels in past searches.

The committee includes four current regents, including the board’s president and the student member, and a former regent whose term expired this year. The chancellors of the flagship campus in Madison and of the university at Superior, and the provost of the LaCrosse campus are also members of the group.

But there are no faculty members or staff on the committee — breaking with past practice, according to a statement from the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents system faculty. “Even by the Regents’ own recent standards, this decision shows a shocking level of disrespect” for the system’s employees and students, the groups wrote.

Excluding faculty not only breaks with Wisconsin’s usual practice, it is counter to a long-term trend across higher education, said Hans Joerg-Tiede, a senior program officer and researcher at the national offices of the AAUP. Over the course of the 20th century, faculty participation in selecting presidents increased from a rarity to being nearly universal, according to the association’s research.

Having a campus chancellor and provost on the committee is helpful, but the group still will have a limited perspective on how faculty and staff might view the candidates, said Geoffrey Peterson, a professor of political science and American Indian studies at the Eau Claire campus.

“I think they believe they understand what we need,” Peterson said. “The question is: Does what they think we need match up to what we think we need?”

Faculty members are hopeful that campus leaders on the committee will be strong voices for their employees, but they see some administrators as having failed to protect faculty in the past. One committee member is Renee Wachter, who was chancellor at the Superior campus in 2017, when administrators debated how they might cut some two dozen academic programs without consulting faculty members. Wachter did not respond before publication of this article.

Other committee members include Rebecca Blank, chancellor at Madison, and Betsy Morgan, provost at LaCrosse. Blank declined to comment for this article. Morgan said in an email that she did “not feel comfortable speaking about the search without knowledge of the job description and the process.”

“Unfortunately, once it is on, I will not be able to answer even general questions as we will be conducting the search,” Morgan added.

Andrew S. Petersen, president of the system’s Board of Regents, said in a statement that a “small, nimble” committee was necessary because of the “competitive environment where multiple state systems are actively searching for new presidential leadership.”

“There will be multiple public opportunities for our shared governance stakeholders to provide meaningful input throughout the process,” Petersen said in his statement. Through the system’s spokesperson, he declined to be interviewed.

Political Pressures

The size of the search committee is also a result of a policy change, approved by the regents in 2017, that limits the size of search committees for system presidents and campus chancellors to 10 members and requires half of them to be regents. Following a change in state law, the new policy also prohibits requiring that candidates for chancellorships hold a doctoral degree or a tenured position.

Those moves, say faculty critics, are the latest examples of how board members and state lawmakers repeatedly trampled on shared governance under the administration of Scott Walker. The two-term Republican governor led the way on eliminating collective bargaining for state employees, enacting steep budget cuts to higher education, and removing protections for tenure and shared governance in state law.

The regents, most of whom are appointed by the governor, followed in Walker’s footsteps. In 2016 they set new rules for tenure and promotion that were widely protested by faculty and which prompted a vote of no confidence in the board and in Cross, the president. Regina Millner, president of the regents at that time, is now a member of the presidential search committee.

There are signs that the political climate is shifting in Wisconsin, but that will have little effect on the current search for a new system president. Governor Evers, who defeated Walker in 2018, is the former superintendent of public instruction in Wisconsin and also a former member of the regents.

He is considered an ally of higher education, but has had the opportunity to appoint only two new regents to the 18-member board. One of those new appointees, Edmund Manydeeds III, is one of the four regents on the search committee.

Democratic state legislators have also pushed back against the regents. Rep. Katrina Shankland sent a letter to the regents asking them to include faculty, staff, and more students on the search committee. “Anything less than full representation of faculty, staff, and students in the search and screen committee will send an illuminating message to all of us,” Shankland wrote in a letter dated November 5.

The regents were not swayed. “As you are aware, the Board of Regents has the primary responsibility to set the direction of the UW System, and that clearly includes the hiring of leadership,” they responded on November 8.

“I had more optimism before they made their search-committee decisions and wrote a letter doubling down” on their choices, Shankland said in an interview.

Faculty members acknowledge that there is little they can do now except wait and see how the process plays out.

“It’s going to be a very small, closely held group,” said Dolan, of the Milwaukee campus. “We really don’t have any recourse.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.