BY FRANK D. LOMONTE

Headhunters for university presidential searches make their six-figure commissions by promising trustees they’ll deliver an efficient search with high-quality candidates. What they’ve delivered to the University of Colorado is a slow-motion train wreck, as president-elect Mark Kennedy struggles to salvage his candidacy after a “ready-fire-aim” search process in which trustees admit they failed to run thorough background checks.

What’s going on in Boulder-—where Kennedy, now president of the University of North Dakota, was sprung on the community April 10 as the euphemistically titled “sole finalist” for Colorado’s presidency-—demonstrates how public legitimacy is lost when presidential hiring is outsourced to secretive headhunting firms.

My article in the spring issue of Academe, “The Costs of Closed Searches,” focuses on the increasingly common phenomenon of the “finalist list of one,” a trend toward hiring university presidents without bringing any of the candidates to campus or disclosing the identities of those, other than the winner, who received consideration. The AAUP has been outspoken for decades about the importance to shared governance of a transparent and inclusive process in which stakeholders have meaningful input. The consequences of excluding the public are becoming painfully apparent in Colorado, where Kennedy is undertaking a belated campus listening tour in advance of the Board of Regents meeting where his ratification is preordained.

When a candidate is chosen despite significant personal or professional baggage-—in Kennedy’s case, a highly conservative voting record during his time as a Republican member of Congress, including opposition to same-sex marriage, out of step with the mainstream of opinion on his soon-to-be campus-—the public is entitled to an explanation. Were there no comparably well-credentialed applicants? Did Kennedy offer something the other candidates did not?

A state university is a powerful government agency, and the president is responsible for delivering an array of services (food, housing, policing, health care) akin to the duties of a big-city mayor. The public’s interest in knowing that the president is trustworthy and well-matched to the culture of the campus community is undeniable. To give up all of the civically healthful benefits of transparency, there must be overwhelming evidence that secrecy is necessary to, as headhunters insist, attract well-qualified candidates to compete.

We decided to test the claim that secret searches produce better candidates, by looking at who actually holds presidencies in a state with closed searches (Georgia) as compared with neighboring states that have traditionally disclosed the identities of finalists (Florida and Tennessee). We found that Georgia was no more likely to hire away a president from a highly rated university than its neighbors, but was far more likely to promote an internal candidate. That makes sense: Secrecy facilitates handing jobs to favored insiders, because they don’t have to measure up in the public’s eye against outside competitors.

While it is doubtful whether secrecy produces a better-quality pool of candidates, it is certain that secrecy produces a lesser-quality search. Headhunting firms have so obsessively constructed the entire process around confidentiality that thoroughness has been sacrificed. In the University of Nebraska’s most recent hiring process, for instance, the trustees were so fearful of creating a trail of publicly accessible records that none of the search committee members was allowed to copy or retain a resume; instead, candidate bios were loaded onto a borrowed iPad that committee members passed around the table. This clumsily engineered process shows how secrecy has been prioritized over quality.

It’s implausible to insist that a candidate of Kennedy’s stature would not compete in a process where finalists’ names are made public—because he just did. Kennedy made it to the final round of contenders at the University of Central Florida in 2018, and the fact that he’d publicly lost out on that presidency did not prevent Colorado regents from offering him the job just a year later.

To be sure, including campus stakeholders in the hiring decision can get messy–just like democracy. At the University of South Carolina, dissatisfied students are giving the Board of Trustees an earful after the pool of presidential candidates was narrowed to eleven male semifinalists, four of whom are now finalists. Not atypically, South Carolina’s board is wildly unrepresentative of the state and community, with just two women and one person of color among the nineteen voting members, in a state with a black population of over 30 percent.

Because trustees can’t effectively be the voice of the community, the community must have a voice of its own.

Mark Kennedy might turn out to be an outstanding president tailor-made for CU-Boulder. But if his candidacy survives the initial wave of public discontent, he will take office under a cloud of suspicion, his presidency weakened before its first day, as a direct consequence of secrecy.

The Florida legislature is now considering a bill that, if passed, would exempt presidential searches from the state’s legendarily expansive public-records law. Before another state joins the “finalist list of one” club, far more research is needed to fact-check the self-serving claims of trustees and headhunters that closed searches produce more successful presidencies.

Guest blogger Frank D. LoMonte is a professor of media law at the University of Florida, where he directs the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, a research center dedicated to improving the public’s access to civically essential information.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.