The most important job of Mississippi’s College Board is the hiring of college presidents. It’s also become the most secretive thing it does — to the detriment of higher education in this state.
Regrettably, the hush-hush, closed-door process that Mississippi helped pioneer a couple of decades ago has now become the norm, at least for public universities throughout the South.
Mississippi Today reports that of the 16 Southern states, Mississippi and six others were the only ones that allowed public universities to keep presidential applicants’ names confidential as of 2000. Today, that’s permitted in all but two states.
The argument has always been that a secret process produces a larger and better crop of potential candidates because they will be more willing to apply if they are confident their current employer won’t know about it unless they get the job.
Yet, that theory has been regularly demonstrated to be fallacious. The latest example is provided by Arkansas, one of the two states that by law does not shield the names of any applicants for college presidencies. This past summer, the University of Arkansas released the list of 21 applicants for the job of chancellor at its Fayetteville campus. Among them was Rodney Bennett, who had been hired nine years earlier as the president of the University of Southern Mississippi at the end of a secret process. Although Bennett didn’t end up getting the job in Arkansas, the openness of the process obviously did not deter his application or that of 20 others.
What it might have deterred, though, is high-paid consultants milking the process to draw huge fees with little additional work.
The Mississippi Today story cited the research of a couple of professors who have studied presidential searches. What they told the news outlet is that these headhunting firms love confidentiality — in fact, they often insist on it in their contracts — because it allows them to recycle the same candidates over and over again for different openings, without anyone being the wiser. All the while they are charging fees that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are other reasons, too, why it is a mistake to run presidential searches with zero transparency. Secrecy limits the amount of vetting that the candidates undergo, it increases the odds that an insider will get the job, and it reduces the buy-in from faculty, alums and community leaders, on whose support the new president will soon depend.
When Mississippi’s College Board conducts a presidential search, the public is asked to take on faith that the ultimate selection was the best of the applicants. But how can it be sure of that without knowing who else had applied?
There is more transparency in Mississippi when a university is looking for a football coach than when it is looking for a president. Whether through leaks or announced visits, it’s pretty well known whom a school is hoping to hire to run the football program well before it happens. But when it’s searching for a president, a huge dome of confidentiality descends until the selection is revealed.
The Legislature shouldn’t allow it.
