BY MARTIN KICH

What follows is from an uncredited story published by the Northwest Florida Daily News:

In a debate that has repeatedly flared in recent years, a House Republican on Monday proposed Sunshine Law exemptions for information about applicants for top jobs at state universities and colleges.

“The proposal (HB 351), filed by Rep. Bob Rommel, R-Naples, would shield from disclosure information about applicants for president, provost or dean positions at state universities and colleges. The exemptions would apply to records and to meetings held to discuss applicants. Information about finalists for the positions would be made available after lists of candidates are whittled down.

“Open-government advocates have fended off such proposals in the past. But Rommel’s bill said the exemptions are necessary because potential applicants might be worried about jeopardizing current jobs if their interest in other positions is made public.

“’If potential applicants fear the possibility of losing their current jobs as a consequence of attempting to progress along their chosen career path or simply seeking different and more rewarding employment, failure to have these safeguards in place could have a chilling effect on the number and quality of applicants available to fill the position of president, provost, or dean of a state university or Florida College System institution,’ the bill says.”

Some of the assumptions providing the rationale for this legislation need to be challenged.

First, given that administrators typically remain in their positions for three to five years, why would their pursuing better positions jeopardize their current positions? The only administrators who do not job-hunt on this sort of predictable cycle are those who are approaching retirement and wish to extend the usual term in office in order to avoid yet another job hunt and relocation. That said, the median age of university presidents has actually been creeping upwards because an increasing number of new hires are in their seventies.

Second, perhaps it is not that an administrator is job hunting that is the issue but, instead, that, in some instances, the job hunting seems to highlight a certain level of disengagement from the administrator’s current responsibilities—a mediocre or uneven level of performance. In such an instance, any public awareness of the job hunting may intensify the scrutiny of the administrator’s performance in his or her current position and even possibly tarnish his or her prospects of landing the new position. (There is, after all, an academic grapevine that e-mail and social media have greatly expanded and facilitated.)

Lastly, the way in which most of these searches are currently conducted has already greatly compromised transparency and shared governance. If the campus community is simply presented with the three or four finalists, the decision-making process has, in effect, been severely truncated and obscured. For the only way to get a sense of how the finalists were selected is to have some sense of the whole pool—some sense of the applicants who did not make the cuts to phone/video interviews, airport interviews, and finally campus visits. I see very little possibility that these practices will change because administrators—understandably–do not wish it to be known how many times they have failed to make those cuts. (That sort of information would probably be more damaging than being an unsuccessful finalist.) But to argue that even when someone makes a written request for the complete records of a search, they should not be made available is basically tantamount to saying that almost no searches to fill administrative positions will ever be challenged–because very few are ever challenged now.

Worse, this bill extends this extra protection—the additional opportunities for cronyism—down to the level of searches for deans.

One cannot help but wonder how much this proposed legislation has been drafted in response to the most recent, highly politicized, and nationally covered search for the new president of Florida State University.

Although boards of trustees are appointed by governors and have long provided an opportunity to reward supporters, an increasing number of college and university presidencies are being filled by former governors and prominent legislators. Because our boards of trustees are composed largely of people with no higher-education experience beyond having been students several to many decades earlier, they end up selecting administrators who reflect their corporate cultures and political ideologies, rather than administrators committed to advancing some conception of higher education itself. Predictably, those administrators are often more focused on the ways in which their corporate or political experience might be transferred to university leadership and its bureaucratic structure, and they show little to no interest in how universities are, institutionally, fundamentally different than corporations, political groups, and governmental bodies.

We have been so focused on the corporatization of our universities that we have paid relatively little attention to the increasing politicization of university leadership. The closest analogy is in the much discussed by seldom addressed revolving door between Capitol Hill and political and corporate lobbying groups.

The complete news article is available at: nwfdailynews.com/news/20170123/lawmakerproposessunshinelawexemptionforcollegeuniversityjobseekers.