As a member of the presidential search committee at Bates College last year, Kirk D. Read says he was always amazed at how the corporate giants who sit on the college's Board of Trustees would stick to the agenda.
"We'll now stop discussing this," the associate professor of French recalls their saying. "It's 10:30. Let's move on."
That's a bit different from how discussion proceeds at faculty meetings, but Mr. Read was nonetheless grateful for the speedy deliberations. He and other professors who have had the good fortune or the misfortune -- depending on their perspective -- of serving on an executive search committee say their first lesson was how time-consuming the process can be. Professors say they also learned how to look out for faculty interests in the hiring process and how to evade the prying questions of colleagues curious about the status of the search.
On some campuses, faculty members are elected to a presidential search committee by their peers. On others, professors are handpicked by the administration. In either case, they spend anywhere from several months to a year sitting through meetings, reading applications, and interviewing candidates. The commitment cuts into the time they would normally spend on research and attending other committee meetings and even forces some to cut back on their teaching. Still, many faculty members say they enjoyed the opportunity to help pick their institution's next leader and to meet people on campus outside of their disciplines.
It's an opportunity that many professors can no longer take for granted. Although the American Association of University Professors does not track the number of faculty members serving on presidential search committees, the association has found that faculty members "are having, if any influence, only token influence," says Mary Burgan, general secretary of the AAUP. "It's always been a bone of contention, but in the past five years or so it has intensified." That's because "the managerial ethos that has seeped over from business into higher education prefers a kind of hierarchy in decision making," which boards of trustees have accepted, Ms. Burgan says, along with the notion that a board "should be the source of all wisdom in our universities."
Trustees seem to feel they need to protect their institutions from special interests, including those of faculty members, Ms. Burgan says. But professors feel that "their interests are the interests of the university." And that's why the AAUP contends that professors need to be vitally involved in searches for presidents and other administrative leaders. "Faculty know what the university is, and they understand what the needs of a particular campus are," she says. "They'll be the ones who have to work with the new president. Their stake is very high, and they can give good advice."
Many professors at Auburn University agree. Two months ago the university's Board of Trustees removed "interim" from William F. Walker's title, naming him president for three years without a presidential search and without any faculty involvement. The move has outraged Auburn's University Senate, which last month voted to censure the board.
"The board's action is in violation of the concept of shared governance in which the president is supposed to be the administrative officer of the Board of Trustees," says Glenn R. Howze, a professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology and president of Auburn's AAUP chapter. "He's also supposed to be head of the faculty. The faculty voice should have been considered."
At the other extreme are the rare instances where a faculty member on a search committee is suddenly asked to become a candidate for the presidency. That happened at Princeton University, when Shirley M. Tilghman, then a faculty representative, was asked to quit the search committee to become a candidate for the presidency and later won the job.
But more typically, faculty members simply want their voices heard during the search, and at Bates, says Mr. Read, his was. He was one of two professors in French, along with two other faculty members, to serve on the college's 18-member presidential search committee that was made up mostly of trustees and some alumni. His department saw it as a good thing that two of its professors were on the panel, influencing the decision making, although he notes, "It's not like we created a cabal." Sometimes job candidates interviewed by the committee would even joke about it. "There are two of you from French," Mr. Read recalls their saying. "What does that mean?"
On a more serious note, Mr. Read says he and the three other faculty members involved in the search were not quite sure the college's trustees would listen to them. "We were pleasantly surprised," he says. Not only did faculty members on the panel voice their concerns about a potential president having an intellectual life, a career in the academy, and an ability to raise money, but trustees did so as well. Still, Mr. Read says, during meetings when the committee would start mentioning candidates who were not academics or were only "tangentially related to the academy, that's when we started to raise our hand."
It must have worked. Elaine T. Hansen, the former provost at Haverford College, took the helm at Bates on July 1.
Mr. Read, who was elected to the committee by his faculty peers, says many faculty colleagues shared their opinions with him on what kind of president they wanted. "I did hear often from them, 'Pick someone good. Kirk, you're not going to screw up.' Two more said, 'Clearly we're not going to take anyone from the corporate world.' Others said: 'We need a businessman. We need someone to make money.'"
Mr. Read says he does feel there's a little pressure on him and other members of the search committee that Ms. Hansen will work out. "I'll be disappointed as much as everybody will if it doesn't work out," he says. "But things seem to be going well. People in the school I've never spoken to say, 'Wow, you did a great job. She said what I wanted to hear.'"
For Helene S. Fine, serving on the 12-member presidential search committee at Bridgewater State College took time away from her research and has left her scrambling this summer to revise papers for publication. But her committee work was far from a thankless task. "It was very interesting for me to work with people from other constituencies within the school," she says, "particularly the Board of Trustees, even maintenance workers, and being able to walk on campus and know somebody I wouldn't normally know."
Some search committees, however, are not so intimate. Cordelia Candelaria, a professor of English at Arizona State University, sat on the 35-member panel that selected Michael M. Crow, the former executive vice provost of Columbia University. He took office at Arizona State this month.
"The committee was so large we had to have microphones" to talk to each other, says Ms. Candelaria, who recalls that everyone sat around a huge round table. "You literally could not see the person you were talking to across the vast oval." The Arizona Board of Regents asked Ms. Candelaria to serve on the committee, which she thinks should have had no more than 18 members. She also thinks the panel should have had more faculty members on it. All but two of the five faculty members on the panel held administrative posts as their primary job, including Ms. Candelaria, who is chairwoman of the university's Chicana/o studies department.
Although she's happy with the choice of Mr. Crow, Ms. Candelaria thinks the process of hiring him was problematic since so few faculty members sat on the committee in the first place. Issues such as whether the president would understand what faculty members do and respect the tradition of faculty participation in governance got short shrift, she says.
"Those who teach have the first point of contact with students," she says. "We're also the ones charged with producing scholarship and research. We're the heart and soul of the institution, not that we don't do it without the support and help of other people, but we have to be the majority number." Not having that majority on the hiring committee, "would be like hiring surgeons and having 90 to 95 percent of the hiring committee be made up of English professors," Ms. Candelaria says. "I don't think that would sit very well with the hospital boards."
Asked whether enough faculty members sat on the presidential search committee at the University of South Carolina, H. Thorne Compton, a professor of theater, says that's like "asking a Democrat if there are enough Democrats in the House of Representatives. Of course not."
But to expect professors to make up half of a presidential search committee is "pretty unrealistic," says Mr. Compton, one of three professors who sat on the 13-member search committee that helped hire Andrew A. Sorensen, the former president of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who took office at South Carolina this month. "The faculty have a very strong interest, but the university also belongs to the people of South Carolina. It doesn't belong to the faculty."
Mr. Compton says he and his two professorial colleagues on the committee talked before the first meeting about how to represent faculty concerns. "We've just been through 10 years of a president who did a very good job in most ways, but there was very little communication between faculty and the Board of Trustees," Mr. Compton says. Although the three professors were initially concerned about how they would relate to board members, "the chair of the committee assured us that they were interested in what faculty had to say" and "surprisingly enough, they were."
Just as faculty members were pleased to see that board members were focused on "academic gains and research growth" in choosing a new president, trustees "were surprised that we were open to a broad range of possibilities for a president rather than someone who fell into strictly a traditional academic model," Mr. Compton says.
When he met with candidates, Mr. Compton believed his main responsibility as a faculty member was to find out what they thought about research, teaching, and learning and "how much they valued these things in the context of all those other things -- like development, advancement, political bridge building, and management -- that a state university president is supposed to think about these days," he says. He also probed a lot about the evaluation of faculty, tenure and promotion, and faculty-welfare issues and asked "very direct questions" about the staffing of courses, especially at the freshman level, and how "quality of teaching is assessed and nurtured." Ultimately, Mr. Compton says, he wanted to make sure that the new president "knew what it meant to be a faculty member and valued it."
During the search, the committee met five or six times for general meetings and then spent two weekends in Charlotte, N.C., for airport meetings with groups of candidates. He also attended meetings that usually lasted two days with a number of candidates who came to campus, some announced but most of them unannounced as "stealth" candidates who didn't want their names made public unless they were finalists in the search.
As a result, "we were able to get a number of people to come and visit our campus and meet with faculty not as official candidates but as people wanting to know more about the university," Mr. Compton says. Faculty members, he says, informally met at least four or five of these candidates and "felt much more included in the whole process."
In the weeks after Mr. Sorensen's appointment, faculty members called Mr. Compton to congratulate him, although he expects to hear from them again "the first time something goes wrong," he says. "Many of my colleagues complain about the abstract 'central administration,' but I happen to be handy and very available to blame. C'est la vie."
Mr. Compton received no credit from his department for his service on the committee. "There was probably more resentment than credit from some in my area," he says. "There was resentment from my department chair that I was spending time on the search which I should have been spending in the department," says Mr. Compton, himself a former chairman. "My department chair, like many chairs, believes that the most important thing a faculty member can do is make the department look good or increase its resources. The value of this kind of service is a bit more subtle."
