The decision of the State College Board to keep secret the names of candidates for the presidency of Mississippi State University has raised objections from some, while others defend the decision.
Institutions of Higher Learning commissioner Tom Meredith and the consultant hired to conduct the search have emphasized the importance of keeping the names of candidates from the public, citing the need to protect the candidates’ current jobs and ensure that the best candidates apply.
MSU associate vice president for academic affairs Ruth Prescott, who chairs the committee that will help screen candidates for the current President Charles Lee’s replacement and is the only official spokesperson for the committee, said she has confidence in Meredith and in Jan Greenwood of Greenwood and Associates Inc., the firm hired to conduct the search.
“I have confidence in them and in the process they’ve laid out, and all of our goal is to get us the best possible president for our university,” she said.
Other campus and community leaders have protested the decision to keep the process secret.
“Our biggest concern is the fact that a new process for selecting the president is disenfranchising faculty, students and the people of Starkville,” said Robert Holland Faculty Senate president Mark Goodman, who is a member of the advisory committee.
The College Board and Greenwood have said that keeping the names of candidates under wraps is consistent with national trends.
Goodman, an associate professor of communication at MSU, said he looked at presidential searches conducted at 31 universities across the nation, many of which still bring candidates in for interviews. He said that many schools have faculty members, students and people from the community on the actual search commitee-in the case of MSU, only members of the College Board are on the committee-and in most of the searches the advisory board met with the search committee that will vote for the next president.
In MSU’s case the advisory committee will not meet with the search committee but will select the names of about five candidates out of all applicants to send to the search committee.
The search committee could conceivably get additional names from elsewhere, Marty Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute of Government, said. For instance, Greenwood could submit a name separately from the advisory committee or an applicant could apply directly to the College Board after the advisory committee submitted names to the board search committee.
The problem with this process, Goodman said, is that members of the IHL search committee-which includes members of the College Board-are the only people who will interview and meet with the candidates.
“This means that the person who will be the next president of Mississippi State will not meet with the students, will not meet with the faculty, and will not have interactions with people in the community,” he said.
“The university would not accept this process if they were hiring a horse handler,” he said.
Ward 4 Alderman Richard Corey said he feels that the city of Starkville should have more representation on the advisory board.
Traditionally, Corey said, at least the mayor of Starkville-currently businessman Dan Camp-is part of the search committee, which Corey said is appropriate “because both the mayor and board’s primary responsibility is to represent the community.”
The only strictly community representative on the advisory committee is Tommy Tomlinson, president of Cadence Bank in Starkville.
“I feel like it is disingenuous for the IHL’s own press release to state that members of the committee were selected from the university and the community when the people whose primary responsibility is to represent the community were not contacted,” Corey said.
Prescott said the community is well represented because it, like other groups, has multiple representatives on the advisory committee, including professors living in the area.
Corey also objected to the lack of openness of the search, saying that he feels that if someone can’t openly apply for the job, he or she probably shouldn’t be applying for the job in the first place.
“As a big proponent of open government, I feel like the same standards should be held to leaders who are going to be appointed to any organization,” he said.
Goodman acknowledged that withholding the names of candidates “does protect or conceivably protect the names of people who have applied for the job.” But, he said, it also means the public has no way of knowing how the search committee operates.
“The more you look at it, the more suspicious this process becomes even if they’re acting with the greatest integrity,” he said.
Furthermore, he said, Meredith’s claims that sitting presidents will not apply if they are worried that they will lose their jobs if their names are released is not necessarily valid because few sitting presidents are likely to apply for the job.
The College Board hopes to get candidates of the highest caliber, director of media relations Annie Mitchell said.
In a Jan. 16 article in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Meredith used an analogy to explain why candidates may prefer secrecy. “It’s hard to tell your wife you might love someone else a little more,” he said. “How can you say you’d like to date someone else?”
“I think there’s some value to that, but again, this is a public university funded by public dollars, and it’s a close call as to whether you err on the side of secrecy or risk scaring off two or three candidates and err on the side of openness,” Wiseman said.
Another reason Goodman objects to the secrecy is because the search could have been used to unite students, faculty, the College Board and Meredith behind one president, he said. “So what, in effect, has happened here is this is a chance to bring us together and the IHL board slap the faculty in the face, slap the students in the face,” he said.
Goodman, like the other members of the advisory committee, signed an agreement that he said prohibits him from discussing or identifying presidential candidates.
Although he cannot discuss candidates or speak for the search advisory committee, he will give the Faculty Senate regular updates on the search process and can speak for the Faculty Senate, he said.
“Dr. Meredith, when he was here for the orientation meeting, told the search advisory committee that it was his desire for there to be one spokesperson for the committee, and that was the chair,” Prescott said.
Goodman and the faculty committee that advises him have sent a letter to presidential search committee chair Ed Blakeslee expressing displeasure that the only contact between the faculty and the candidates will be indirect and outlining the benefits campus visits would have for both members of the MSU community and candidates.
The Faculty Senate plans to communicate with the candidates through a series of letters posted on the group’s Web site, www.facultysenate.msstate.edu, Goodman said.
Previously, Goodman sent a letter, signed only by himself, to people mentioned in newspaper articles as potential candidates inviting them to campus to meet with the Faculty Senate. So far nobody he invited has responded, but if they did, it would not be part of the official search process, he said.
Goodman said he has had support in his opposition to the secrecy of the search from many faculty members at MSU, as well as at other Mississippi universities, although some MSU faculty feel they should be more passive.
“I have had overwhelming support from the people who have stopped to talk to me about it or e-mail me,” he said.