The decision last month of the Iowa Board of Regents to name former IBM senior vice president J. Bruce Harreld as the University of Iowa’s next president, despite widespread opposition to his candidacy among faculty and others, has brought renewed attention to presidential searches.  This past weekend at the request of the UI AAUP chapter two AAUP members representing the national organization visited Iowa City to meet with faculty and others in order to determine whether and to what extent AAUP principles and policies had been violated.  They had hoped to meet as well with members of the Board of Regents and interim president Jean Robillard, but were rebuffed.

“Their main interest is the search for the new president,” said Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary for the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. “They are not investigating the qualifications of Mr. Harreld for the job. He doesn’t have traditional qualifications, but that is not our purpose here.”  Added Kurland, ““For a major research university of that caliber to have private meetings and things done on the side … the deviation from sound and due process is striking.”

But as I pointed out in a previous post to this blog, in one sense the Iowa search was almost exemplary in providing faculty and the public an opportunity to compare the qualifications of the final candidates: “Iowa is one of a few states that still require public disclosure of finalists, and the search included campus visits by all four candidates.  Increasingly, however, such visits are rare and with growing frequency all that a college or university community may learn about a presidential search will be the name of the winning candidate.”

But now faculty opposition to such secrecy is growing.  At Miami University in Ohio, three faculty members of the search committee for a new president were required to sign a “nondisclosure” agreement as a condition of their participation in the search.  As Karen Dawisha and Keith Tuma, co-presidents of the Miami University chapter of the AAUP, and John McNay, president of the AAUP’s Ohio Conference, put it in an op-ed piece published by the Cincinnati Inquirer, such a practice “does not represent an open process in which the input of all members of the university community is considered. It does not suggest that the board takes shared governance seriously. Faculty should be widely consulted and have input in all important decisions at the institution. They do the work that is central to the university’s core mission – instruction and research – and they know a lot about the qualifications and commitments a president should have.”

At Eastern Michigan University, both the school’s all-union council and the Academic Senate decided to remove their representatives from a presidential search advisory committee to protest its secrecy.  Judith Kullberg, a political science professor and the vice president of the faculty senate, added that the faculty would not add two additional members to the advisory committee, which board chair Michelle Crumm suggested as a solution to the faculty’s complaints about its lack of representation in the process.  In an address to the regents last Tuesday, Howard Bunsis, the treasurer and spokesman for the EMU Chapter of the AAUP (and national chair of AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress), said, “this decision makes clear that the board does not believe in shared governance. This is not a surprise as most of you come from the private sector, which is very different from a university. Colleges and universities are different and public universities especially so.  Faculty has a voice that needs to be heard for the simple reason that we teach the students and we are the ones who are closest to the core mission of EMU.” (The unions’ full statement was posted previously to this blog.)

This morning Inside Higher Ed reports that “Chaos shrouds a controversial presidential search at the 16-campus University of North Carolina system: a prominent finalist’s name has been leaked, the system’s governing board suffers fractious infighting, and the state Legislature and many faculty members are concerned the search lacks transparency.”  Jim Carmichael, a library and information science professor at UNC’s Greensboro campus and leader of the system’s AAUP chapter, bemoaned a general lack of trust of the board by faculty members, much of which stems from the dismissal of the previous president, Thomas Ross.

“Tom Ross was the best system president we’ve had in a long time. We still have not accepted the fact that they are going right ahead with the search, that they are completely in the right and they can do whatever they want,” Carmichael told Inside Higher Ed. “The board has been heavy-handed in the way they handled things and then of course the Legislature got heavy-handed with them and tried to micromanage them.”

Gabriel Lugo, a math professor at UNC Wilmington and chair-elect of the Faculty Assembly, the governing body that represents faculty from all 16 of the system’s campuses, criticized the search for Ross’s replacement as being “clouded in secrecy” from its start. “I’m not surprised we’re at this state where it’s not just the faculty or the students or the staff that feel left out, but other members of the board who feel they are left out of the process,” he said. “The search committee has conflated two different ideas. They’ve conflated confidentiality with secrecy, and that’s not the same thing.”

Meanwhile, the fight against secret searches has escalated as well in the country’s largest higher education system, the California State University (CSU), with approximately a half million students and some 26,000 faculty members, and where faculty members today began voting on whether or not to authorize a strike for improved salaries.  To provide insight on what’s happening with searches there, I asked Catherine Nelson, a political science professor at Sonoma State University and chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the CSU systemwide Academic Senate, for comments.  Here’s what she wrote:

In 2015-16 the California State University (CSU) system will undertake searches for new presidents at the San Jose, Sonoma State, Channel Islands and Chico campuses. Academic Senates on all four campuses have passed resolutions calling for open searches. In what one colleague called a “groundswell,” a total of twenty-one [out of 23] CSU campus academic senates have passed, are considering or are beginning the process of considering, similar statements.

CSU policy used to mandate campus visits by finalists in presidential searches. However, in 2011 the Board of Trustees changed their policy to allow the Chancellor and Chair of the Trustees Committee for the Selection of the President to decide whether or not searches will be open. Since 2011 eight presidential searches have been closed, and if history is any guide, the system is on track to close the four this year as well. Chancellor Tim White told the statewide Academic Senate CSU that the only exception would be if all finalists in a particular search agreed to the campus visits.

Chancellor White has publicly stated numerous times that closed searches result in a better pool of candidates. He claims that the best candidates won’t apply for the job if open visits are required because to do so would jeopardize their current positions. But the CSU is a public university system, and as such should meet a higher standard of transparency and meaningful consultation with campus constituencies in presidential searches. As the Sonoma State University Academic Senate’s resolution states, a closed search would “…mean a less transparent search process and less confidence in the outcome on the part of the university community and public.” Even the new president of CSU Sacramento, Robert S. Nelsen, expressed his dislike of the closed search process he had just gone through. He commented that “I hate that I didn’t get the opportunity to meet all of you during the search and that I am only meeting you now. And I don’t like it that you are only meeting me now and that the huge majority of you had no say in whom [sic] your next president would be.”

Nelson added that “Faculty in the CSU system are not alone in pushing back against the growing trend toward closed searches.”   In additions to the examples described above, she noted that “colleagues at the University of Delaware, Florida State University and Louisiana State University have recently called, in one form or another, for greater transparency in presidential or chancellor search processes.”

The notion that “confidential” (i.e., secret) searches are necessary to ensure that the most qualified candidates will apply is completely unsubstantiated by any solid evidence; indeed, there is much to suggest that the idea is little more than hokum.  Joerg Tiede and Mike Theune, for example, conducted a survey of liberal arts colleges and asked whether those that conducted an open search for chief academic officers (which is admittedly different from presidents) lost candidates because of the openness of the search. Only 3% reported that they did. The results were published in Academe.

The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, formulated jointly by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (the 50th anniversary of which we will celebrate next year), states:

Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The selection of a chief administrative officer should follow upon a cooperative search by the governing board and the faculty, taking into consideration the opinions of others who are appropriately interested. The president should be equally qualified to serve both as the executive officer of the governing board and as the chief academic officer of the institution and the faculty. The president’s dual role requires an ability to interpret to board and faculty the educational views and concepts of institutional government of the other. The president should have the confidence of the board and the faculty.

AAUP’s 1981 Faculty Participation in the Selection, Evaluation,and Retention of Administrators articulates the importance of faculty participation:

The Statement on Government emphasizes the primary role of faculty and board in the search for a president. The search may be initiated either by separate committees of the faculty and board or by a joint committee of the faculty and board or of faculty, board, students, and others; and separate committees may subsequently be joined. In a joint committee, the numbers from each constituency should reflect both the primacy of faculty concern and range of other groups, including students, that have legitimate claim to some involvement. Each group should select its own members to serve on the committee, and the rules governing the search should be arrived at jointly. A joint committee should determine the size of the majority which will be controlling in making the appointment. When separate committees are used, the board, with which the legal authority rests, should either select a name from among those submitted by the faculty committee or should agree that no person will be chosen over the objections of the faculty committee.

The growing movement of boards of trustees and administrators to conduct searches behind closed doors, even with faculty “representation,” violates both the spirit and the letter of these policies.  As such, the movement against such practices is only destined to grow.