A meeting of the presidential search advisory committee narrowed the list of presidential candidates to six Tuesday, but the candidates’ names are still being withheld.
The names of the six candidates will be sent to the state College Board’s presidential search committee for interviewing, advisory committee spokesperson Ruth Prescott said. They will then be narrowed down to three confidential candidates, she said.
Two retired faculty members, Lorenzo Crowell and Clyde Williams, attempted to enter Tuesday’s meeting.
“They asked to be in the meeting,” Prescott said. “I told them that it was a working session and was considered to be confidential.”
“I insisted that this was an advisory group and that it was covered by law” and that they needed to go into executive session,” Williams said.
When Williams said that the public meetings laws required that the meeting be open, Prescott said she decided to seek counsel on the matter.
“Mr. [Charles] Guest, Mississippi State’s legal counsel, said that the scope of the meeting was not covered by the public meeting laws,” Prescott said. “I don’t think any minds were changed, but they left and we had our meeting.”
Guest said the group was a working group, not an advisory group, Williams said.
Williams said he asked Prescott if she would tell the people in the group that was about to Williams said he asked Prescott if she would tell the people in the group that was about to meet that they were a working session. He said he asked the question three times, and that at first Prescott would not answer. Eventually, she told him she would not get into a debate about it with him and went into another room with Guest.
Leonard Van Slyke, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information, said he does not think the meeting was too small to be coveerd by the act.
“I think that any committee that is formed by a government entity is subject to the law,” he said.
However, although it was procedurally incorrect to eject Crowell and Williams the from meeting without going into executive session, there was no substantitive difference beause they would have had to go into executive session to discuss personnel matters, he said.
Williams said he would have left the meeting without a problem if they had gone into executive session.
A College Board press release announced Wednesday the names of five observers from MSU that will be in attendance at the board’s presidential search process. These observers are Student Association President Jon David Cole; Linda Cornelious, professor of instructional systems and workforce development; vice president for student affairs Bill Kibler; Rod Moore, MSU Foundation president; and Prescott.
In the College Board search process, the preferred candidate will be decided, Prescott said.
“Once the preferred candidate has been chosen, he will come to campus and interact with his various constituencies,” Prescott said. “This should be in the first part of April,” she said.
Faculty Senate member Louis D’Abramo said the final candidate’s visitation does not mean anything.
“That individual has already been chosen,” he said. “It’s almost like, ‘Well, we’ll have a social hour now because this is the person that [is here]. You’ll accept this person that we chose because we thought this was the best candidate.'”
The confidentiality of the presidential search has been a major object of debate since the beginning of the search. In a recent article, Thomas Meredith, the College Board commissioner, compared the MSU presidential search to executive job searches.
“Confidential executive job searches, a long standard in the business world, are now the norm in the world of academia,” he said.
D’Abramo disagreed with this comparison. “It’s called The People’s University. If they want to live up to [this] nomer, then this should be an open search,” he said.
A letter from the Faculty Senate was issued to the next president of MSU Feb. 10. This letter, which is posted on the Faculty Senate Web site at www.facultysenate.msstate.edu, is intended to help a potential candidate know that the faculty is very interested in the future of MSU, D’Abramo said.
“We want the next president to know that we oppose the process, not the person,” he said.