LoMonte: Florida university presidential searches mustn’t be done in secret

Being the president of a public university is like being the mayor of a good-sized city.

You oversee a budget that can top $6 billion a year in public money, run a police force, and supervise housing and healthcare services for thousands of people.

But while we’d never accept a mayor secretly hired by a handful of influential business executives, Florida is on the verge of deciding to do just that for state university presidencies.

The state’s tradition of bringing presidential finalists to campus to meet with alumni, faculty and students would be traded for interviews in airport hotels, in which trustees and corporate headhunters will choose someone who may never have set foot on the campus.

For more than a decade, lobbyists for executive headhunting firms -- who make their money placing candidates in presidencies -- have been telling Florida lawmakers that the state’s famously progressive open-government laws are hurting presidential recruitment. (Never mind that the reputations of the University of Florida and Florida State University have stratospherically soared in recent years under presidents hired in transparent, inclusive searches.)

This year, Florida lawmakers seem to have put aside their skepticism. They’re on the verge of passing legislation that will give corporate headhunters the secrecy they’ve long craved.

There is, in fact, no evidence that universities get better results when they hire presidents without disclosing the names of the candidates, and quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that secrecy is making presidential terms shorter and less successful.

In recent years, the flagship state universities in Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington have each conducted secret, closed-door searches and ended up promoting insider candidates, with no indication that anyone else received serious consideration. (Trustees in Washington were given scripts to read, including the winner’s name, at the meeting where they were supposed to openly debate the candidates’ merits.)

Secrecy allowed Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to engineer his own appointment to the presidency of Purdue University, and secrecy almost resulted in Penn State University hiring a president under criminal investigation for financial wrongdoing -- a fate that was avoided only by a just-in-time leak to the media.

At the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, we compared the outcomes of a closed-search state (Georgia) against two neighboring open-search states (Florida and Tennessee) to see whether secrecy advocates are telling the truth. If the argument for secrecy holds up, then Georgia should have more university presidents from prestigious institutions who’ve left sitting presidencies elsewhere.

That’s not how it’s worked out. The primary beneficiaries of secrecy, our research found, have been insider candidates. Most Georgia university presidents don’t get their jobs by competing against some mythical field of “secret out-of-state superstars.” They get their jobs by having connections to the university chancellor and trustees.

Lawmakers have been assured that Florida searches won’t be entirely secretive, because the proposed bill calls for the public to see the names of three finalists. Based on that assurance, the legislation is sailing through the House and Senate.

But that’s a false assurance, disproven by history everywhere else. In every state where the public is legally entitled to see multiple finalists, trustees and headhunting firms have found ways to play word-games by denying that they have “finalists.”

It’s what happened at the University of Colorado, where former Republican congressman Mark Kennedy was declared “lone finalist” to avoid the legally required disclosure of other interviewees. It’s what happened at Kent State University, where an insider candidate got promoted in a secret search and the university is refusing to say whether anyone else got an interview. It’s what’s happening today at Ohio State University, where the board chair just announced -- in defiance of state law -- plans to conduct a 100 percent closed-door search.

Make no mistake: If presidential secrecy becomes the law in Florida, the public’s input will become zero. The promise of three finalists has been broken everywhere else. There’s no reason to believe it will be kept here.

Before taking a final vote, Florida lawmakers should ask themselves: What are we gaining by hiring presidents secretly, and what are we giving up?

Here’s what’s on the “openness” side of the ledger. You’ll get a president who has been thoroughly backgrounded, who’s a cultural and personality fit with the community, who’s sensitized to the need for making important decisions in the open, in a process that reassures the community of a fair and thorough search. There’s no disputing that an open process produces better results than a closed one.

And here’s what’s on the “closed” side of the ledger. Some sitting presidents won’t apply, because they’re convinced they will face retaliation from their bosses back home if their names are exposed.

That’s it. The drive for secret searches is built entirely around validating retaliation, accepting that trustees will wrongfully punish candidates who agree to be interviewed for better jobs. It’s like closing down the university and moving the buildings to another city because there are too many muggings in the neighborhood, instead of arresting the muggers.

There’s another way. If retaliation is the driving force behind secrecy, legislators can instead pass rigorous anti-retaliation laws, giving anyone who is punished for interviewing for a Florida presidency a claim for damages if they face reprisals from their employers.

While secret hiring might have been defensible a decade ago, it fails the straight-face test now that scores of #MeToo disclosures have alerted us to the harassment culture that pervades executive suites, including in higher education. Because headhunting firms insist on secrecy, they do no background checks at the candidates’ home campuses -- that, after all, would compromise the secrecy. So if finalists’ names are not made public, there is no opportunity for whistleblowers to come forward.

Lawmakers would be well-advised to survey the wreckage that obsessive secrecy has left at higher-ed institutions everywhere. Michigan State University is in free-fall, its former president facing criminal charges, after a cover-up of decades-long sexual misconduct by medical faculty member Larry Nassar. The University of North Carolina and the University of Texas are being sued for defying their state public-records laws to conceal the severity of sexual assaults on campus.

It’s hard to look at the ills afflicting higher education today and conclude that the cure is “more secrecy.”

Frank D. LoMonte is a professor who teaches media law, and is director of The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information in the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. His views are personal and do not represent those of the university. He wrote this for The Palm Beach Post.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: LoMonte: Florida university presidential searches mustn't be done in secret