BY MATTHEW BOEDY
When the AAUP made funds available to all state conferences last year, I, as the state president of the Georgia conference, had an idea.
This academic year we have had six presidents in our state’s public higher education system, which includes twenty-six institutions, announce that they were leaving. When we received word about the grants, some searches were well underway. One search committee was just named this month.
We also have a search ongoing for the system’s chancellor. The state board of regents paused the naming of any presidential finalists until a new chancellor is named. The naming of the new chancellor had been imminent, as the board said it would name one “mid-spring,” but then the board announced a “pause” to that search on Thursday.
The funding gave us an opportunity to see what we could find out about these searches before they ended. So I used our state’s open-records law to search through the email inboxes of colleagues on these committees, looking for keywords that would ferret out information about the process.
To be honest, as someone whose inbox has been searched using this law by conservative groups, I felt so uneasy doing it, I sent these faculty members a note letting them know that our search had begun.
State law prohibits releasing any “identifying information” on candidates, so names, employers, and other details were redacted. And with search firms using their private servers to store CVs and applications, we didn’t expect to discover much about the individuals. So why did we spend about $500 on fees for these emails?
First, we learned things the committees didn’t share with their colleagues. While faculty at some institutions have received some updates and there have been “listening sessions” for members of the campus community, one AAUP member told me our email search told her more than she learned from her institution’s updates.
Second, I wanted to open up these closed searches as much as I could. The search committees were appointed by the system, not elected. We know they signed confidentiality agreements. We learned that one institution conducted “virtual” campus visits and asked some non-committee members to speak to candidates. We also learned the timeline for upcoming interviews for another institution.
Third, we did learn some important things about the searches.
An email in February from the search firm helping to find the next president at one of Georgia’s HBCUs, Savannah State University, told the presidential search committee that the pool of twenty-eight applicants included sixteen people of color. We also learned that the SSU search committee has sent the names of four unranked candidates to the regents. They only await the naming of a chancellor to move forward.
An email about the search at Clayton State noted the estimated costs: $130,000, with $105,000 for the search firm and $25,000 for ads. We also learned that the president of the University of West Florida recommended someone through a phone call with the current CSU president.
Not a big information haul. Was it worth it? I think it was important to do for our members left in the dark at these institutions. I also shared what we learned with local media.
But most of all, I don’t think the trend toward closed searches for public colleges and universities will change anytime soon. And so the sad truth is that this kind of fishing expedition may be the only tool we can use to learn about these searches. Maybe next time we will learn about problem candidates before they turn into problem presidents. In Georgia, we have seen support for presidents crater after they have made bad decisions. We have had presidents who tried to erase or diminish shared governance.
With such high stakes now for presidential searches, I think someone needs to hold the search committees accountable. We need changes in our laws to open these searches. But for now, all we can do is look in from the outside.
Guest blogger Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia state AAUP conference and associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia.
