The Matchmaker

When colleges need presidents, they turn to consultants like Bill Funk

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By JOHN L. PULLEY

Dallas

Eighteen floors above the street-level bustle of the Uptown District here, morning light streams into a corner office through floor-to-ceiling windows. R. William Funk tilts his chair back, stretches his legs, and props a pair of size-12 black-tasseled loafers onto a hand-carved cherry-wood desk. From a radio resting on a massive credenza behind him comes a steady stream of songs by James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and other rock and soul singers.

Then the phone rings, and Mr. Funk goes to work.

On the other end of the line is Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System, who was forced from office in March by a series of scandals. She has called to discuss her career with Mr. Funk, a senior consultant and manager of the education practice at Korn/Ferry International, a major executive-search firm. He is, to use the vulgar term, a headhunter.

For almost a quarter-century, Bill Funk, 56, has played a key role in matching colleges with presidents and chancellors. His bona fides are impressive: He has had a hand in the hiring of more than 250 chief executives in academe, as well as numerous provosts, deans, and other top-level administrators. At one point, he says, he had recruited nearly a fourth of the sitting presidents of the nation's top 60 research institutions, and nine of the presidents of Big Ten systems or their flagship institutions. The University of Iowa delayed its search for a new leader a few years ago in order to secure the services of Mr. Funk, who at the time was helping the University of Minnesota. In recent months he has handled searches for presidents at Baylor, Hamline, and Kettering Universities and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His relationship with Betsy Hoffman goes back several years, to when he worked on the search for a chancellor for the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was provost. Now, five years later, he urges Ms. Hoffman to focus on her future. The incidents that did her in at Colorado were largely beyond her control, he says: incendiary remarks made by an outspoken professor, and Congressional hearings that looked into misconduct by the university's football team, including alleged sexual assaults.

"I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but what are we gonna to do now?" asks Mr. Funk.

For the past three decades, headhunters like Mr. Funk have played an increasingly important role in the selection of academic leaders. Long gone are the days when professors rose through the ranks, and a few informal inquiries landed a president. Now consultants are brought in for more than half of all presidential searches -- up from 16 percent since the mid-1980s -- and are frequently tapped for lower-level searches as well.

Not everyone is happy about that. The growing reliance on headhunters is incompatible with academe's sensibilities, assert some critics, many of them faculty members who say the trend reflects a creeping corporatization that is slowly turning colleges into bottom-line operations.

"The academy is becoming ever more corporatelike, and presidents are becoming CEO's," says Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors.

But experts say the shift is largely a response to practical considerations and market forces. As colleges have grown into complex and sprawling institutions, the volunteer boards that run them have become more dependent on professional consultants to help them vet and select campus leaders. Finding accomplished administrators who can handle the myriad responsibilities of a contemporary college president has become much harder. Selecting a president over cognac and a cigar is no longer a sensible option.

As Ms. Hoffman opens up to Mr. Funk, he punctuates the conversation with words of encouragement: "I think your testimony before Congress was positively received. ... I was visiting with Gordon Gee [president of Vanderbilt University] the day you announced your resignation. He said, 'How do you think Betsy will fare?' ... He thought you had done masterfully well. ... He's a real fan."

Mr. Funk chuckles at something Ms. Hoffman says and then gets down to business.

"Let's do a couple of things," he says. "Let's get together in person. Let's start thinking about places that might be attractive to you. Send me an updated résumé and other material."

"This might not take long at all," Mr. Funk says. "Or it might take a few months."

A Search Business Is Born

Growing up in the coal-mining city of Uniontown, Pa., Mr. Funk didn't set out to be an executive-search consultant. After graduating from California University of Pennsylvania, he picked up a master's in government at Ohio University. While working on his Ph.D. at Purdue University, he says, he realized that he "was the only guy in the poli-sci department who didn't have facial hair" and transferred to the university's graduate school of business. He earned the equivalent of an M.B.A. and landed a corporate job in Houston's oil-and-gas industry.

He rose quickly through the ranks and within a few years was recruiting employees for Exxon, a task that gave Mr. Funk his first exposure to executive-search firms. One of them, Heidrick & Struggles International, saw something in the young man and offered him a job in 1980. Mr. Funk says he "didn't know whether to be flattered or embarrassed," as he "had always had a pretty negative view" of executive-search consultants.

Still, Exxon was pressuring him to relocate, and Mr. Funk by now had a wife and two children. Within two years, by the age of 35, he had been named managing partner of Heidrick's Houston office. His mentor there was William J. Bowen, whom Mr. Funk calls the father of the executive-search business in higher education.

A few years earlier, in 1976, a group of high-powered businessmen from Brown University's board had approached Mr. Bowen with a proposition. They were getting nowhere in their search for a new president and asked for his help. Mr. Bowen, who is now retired, recalls that he accepted the assignment with reluctance, "telling them right up front that we had no experience" in higher-education searches. They told him, "Look, let's work together. You'll learn something from us, and we'll learn something from you."

With Mr. Bowen's help, Brown recruited Carleton College's president, Howard Swearer. The following year, when Cornell University was preparing to search for its next president, a member of Brown's board recommended Mr. Bowen.

A new era of selecting college presidents had begun.

Soon after Mr. Funk joined Heidrick, the firm won a "shootout" -- a competition in which six or more consultants are invited to pitch for a search contract -- to conduct a presidential search at Texas A&I University (since renamed Texas A&M University at Kingsville). And Mr. Funk was tapped to run his first higher-education search.

The board of Texas A&I was desperate to get a president who would raise the stature of the institution, which had been insensitively dubbed "Taco Tech," a prominent trustee told Mr. Funk at the time. "I didn't know what the hell I was doing," Mr. Funk recalls.

Nonetheless the search went well, resulting in the selection of Steven Altman, who remained president for four years. (A subsequent executive search, not conducted by Mr. Funk, resulted in Mr. Altman's being named president of the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. He was forced to resign in 1990, however, after being implicated in a sex scandal -- the kind of unexpected meltdown that search consultants dread.)

Several hundred searches later, Mr. Funk has built up a reputation that can survive the occasional debacle.

In 2002, a decade after he left Heidrick to run the higher-education practice at Korn/Ferry, he led the search that brought John Shumaker to the University of Tennessee's flagship campus. Luring the highly regarded president away from the University of Louisville was considered a coup. But a year into his tenure in Knoxville, Mr. Shumaker's presidency crashed amid allegations of improper spending and using the university's aircraft for personal travel, charges that Mr. Shumaker has said are inflated.

Some Tennessee lawmakers suggested during a public hearing that Mr. Funk could have done a better job of vetting the candidate. The university's trustees opted not to exercise Mr. Funk's standard guarantee to redo, at no additional charge, any search that produces a president who fails within the first two years of taking office.

Using a consultant, Mr. Funk wryly notes, provides a handy scapegoat in the event that a president is a dud.

He says the Colorado School of Mines is the only institution to have taken advantage of the redo guarantee, asking for a new search in 2000 after the president it had hired with his help, Theodore A. Bickart, had been on the job for almost two years. The board concluded that Mr. Bickart lacked the right touch with alumni and had poor fund-raising skills, the consultant says. The president resigned in May, and in July a search led by Mr. Funk resulted in the naming of John Trefny, a vice president of the school, to the presidency. He is still in office.

Picking Up a Trail in Denver

A week after talking to Ms. Hoffman, Mr. Funk arrives in Denver "to pick up the search" for a chancellor who will lead the recently consolidated University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, which "has every potential to be the next great urban university," he says.

Korn/Ferry's fees for higher-education searches begin at $50,000 and can reach $90,000, plus expenses, for a leader of a large research university. In setting fees, the most important factors are the size of the institution and level of the position being filled. Finding a dean for a business school can cost as much as or more than some presidential searches.

The "pick up" is the consultant's vernacular for the first step of a process that, if all goes well, will result in the hiring of a leader in about six months, about twice as long as it takes to select the chief executive of a major corporation.

"These guys who do corporate searches would never do what I do," says Mr. Funk.

Higher-education searches take longer because there are more groups to be satisfied. During the campus unrest of the 1960s and 70s, constituencies that had accepted the divine right of college presidents suddenly turned a critical eye toward those leaders. Students, faculty members, alumni, and local leaders began to insist on greater accountability and to demand a role in the selection of presidents.

"The yearlong search was not uncommon" 15 years ago, and some took twice as long, says Shelly Weiss Storbeck, who leads presidential searches for A.T. Kearney Executive Search. But in today's fast-paced world, she says, "institutions can't slide indefinitely."

But while the search time has been halved, the number of details that a search consultant typically handles has, if anything, increased.

Over the next two days, Mr. Funk lays the groundwork for the search in Denver. He walks the two campuses and meets with faculty members, students, vice presidents, and provosts of the merging institutions.

Midway through the get-to-know-you blitzkrieg, a storm rumbles down from the Rocky Mountains and pelts Denver with golf-ball-size hailstones. As omens go, this one could have been better. Sure enough, it soon becomes apparent that the merger lacks widespread support among both staffs. People at the Health Sciences Center question the wisdom of joining forces with a commuter institution that serves primarily undergraduates, and members of the staff at the university are leery as well. In his job, Mr. Funk is often called on to play the role of mediator.

"It became clear that one of the real challenges will be to be a healer," Mr. Funk says of his initial visit. "My role on both campuses was to give them some assurance that a logical process was in place, and that there would not be a new leader forced on them."

A member of the faculty who attends a public forum on the search makes no bones about not wanting to work for medical administrators. She may well not care for Mr. Funk, either. Professors tend to view consultants as hired guns recruited to do the bidding of management.

"There's almost a hostility on the part of faculty when a search firm is brought in," says Mr. Funk.

Nor have faculty members warmed to the trend of institutions' being more inclined to consider nontraditional candidates -- business leaders, politicians, military commanders, and others without significant experience in academe -- for top posts.

"Faculty members don't buy into that," says Mr. Funk, observing that professors continue to view presidents as institutions' chief academics. Nontraditional candidates do tend to crash, he concedes. Businesspeople often are unwilling or unable to make the leap from the hierarchical power structure of corporations to the shared governance that prevails in academe. Military leaders tend to fare no better. Henry A. Zimon, a retired U.S. Army colonel, resigned the presidency of Albright College last year amid allegations that he had falsified his academic and publishing record. Despite the scandal, says Mr. Funk, Colonel Zimon has been considered for presidencies elsewhere.

"You do see some generals becoming presidents," says Mr. Funk, "but talk about a lethal mix of cultures!"

Over the years, this headhunter has come to believe that presidential searches traumatize institutions as a matter of course. It happens whether the vacancy being filled is created by a president resigning under a cloud or one who is retiring after many years of distinguished service, he says. Either way, members of various constituencies invariably fret about the looming change, unsure of what it will mean to their group or to them as individuals. Vice presidents tend to worry the most about job loss, even though when an institution gets a new chief executive officer it is the provost who is most likely to be canned, Mr. Funk says.

During these periods of unrest, Mr. Funk seeks to be a force of calm. He strives to make the transition a celebration of the departing president's accomplishments, if possible, while taking stock and planning for the institution's future.

"It's important that search firms be viewed as stable and highly reputable," says Thomas C. Longin, a former vice president at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

At Baylor University, he is helping trustees search for a successor to Robert B. Sloan, who will step down from the presidency in June. He announced his resignation in January, after a deeply divided faculty voted no confidence in his ability to lead the Baptist institution. The controversy surrounding Mr. Sloan stemmed in part from what some faculty members view as his practice of imposing a religious litmus test for new appointments, and in part from the murder trial of a basketball player charged with killing a teammate.

The challenge at Baylor is to find someone who will satisfy all parties.

"I'm a Presbyterian. I don't know why they retained me to do this," jokes Mr. Funk. "I'm like Diogenes down here. I'm looking for that one Baptist."

Caricature at the Palm

The end of the information-technology boom a few years ago sent the executive-search business into a tailspin. Korn/Ferry and other firms trimmed their fees to entice companies to buy their services. Korn/Ferry's 45-person Dallas office, the second-most profitable of its 72 worldwide locations, cut its staff by more than half. But the firm's higher-education practice, which Mr. Funk says is "recession proof," didn't reduce its fees, and it hasn't missed a beat. Korn/Ferry's work with nonprofit organizations produces income of $24-million to $30-million annually, half of it from higher-education searches. Mr. Funk's annual compensation typically approaches seven figures. Business is good.

When Mr. Funk is not on the road, he frequently dines at the Dallas branch of the Palm, a prototypical power steakhouse. It acknowledges the celebrity and influence of its well-heeled clientele by decorating its walls with caricatures of politicians, entertainers, and athletes. No college presidents are depicted, but right at the entrance, Mr. Funk's likeness is easy to spot.

He has succeeded, in part, because although he is in business to serve the colleges that pay his fees, he has made it his business to know the men and women who run those institutions. "Nearly some part of my every day in the office is spent counseling with sitting presidents," Mr. Funk says.

He knows who's up, who's down, who's ready to take a walk. His Rolodex is fat with the names of more than 600 of the top administrators and opinion makers in higher education. With each new search that he undertakes, Mr. Funk sends a letter to every person on his list, asking them all to submit nominations. The letters are hand-signed, and most include a personal note that encourages the recipient to "Stay close."

"The Rolodex of candidates and the network of relationships and the knowledge about the institutions were really the most important and impressive part of the work Bill did," says John G. Turner, who was chairman of Hamline University's presidential-search committee. It settled on Linda N. Hanson, who will take office in July.

As for demeanor, Mr. Turner says, the consultant discharged his duties with understated efficiency: "He was very easy to work with. Always accessible. He's a very low-key type of person."

Mr. Funk is the same way at home. Describing himself as a typical family guy, he says he and his wife have been married for more than 30 years, after meeting at Ohio University. They spend a lot of time attending the basketball games of their two teenage sons, says Mr. Funk, who adds that he jogs and works out only "with some irregularity." He has a weakness for Lexus automobiles (he owns three of them), and his one admitted vice is betting on the horses at the Lone Star Park racetrack. "Over all, I'm a pretty boring guy."

The key to being an accomplished search consultant, he says, is to match the right president to the right institution at the right time. Take E. Gordon Gee, who was leading Brown University when Mr. Funk recruited him to become president of Vanderbilt in 2000. Vanderbilt had lost its focus and needed a kick in the pants, the consultant says, and Mr. Gee has delivered.

When a search is in full swing, Mr. Funk works the phones, ringing up well-connected people in academe, including officers of higher-education associations, to solicit nominations and information about applicants. Experience has taught him to consider the motivations of each person who recommends a candidate. Sometimes people nominate themselves. Sometimes they nominate an unwanted colleague.

"If a president recommends his provost," which happens once or twice a year, Mr. Funk says, "you have to be wary."

Institutions can expect 50 to 60 prospective presidents to apply for an opening, on average, down from a typical pool of 100 to 150 a few years ago. The size of applicant pools has shrunk even as presidential pay has risen sharply.

"These are tough jobs," says Mr. Funk. "The pressures and stress on university presidents has become greater." Relative to the salaries earned by corporate chief executive officers with similar responsibilities, "you can make the case that the [college presidents'] salaries are artificially low," he says.

"I worry about the turnover," he adds. "It's good for my business, but I'm not so sure it's good for higher education."

Trustees hoping to lure a sitting president to their institution will often call on Mr. Funk to gauge the quarry's interest. Sometimes he is asked to play a role in flushing out the candidate. To that end, he has flown on more small, college-owned aircraft than he cares to remember. Still, he says, he will not put the moves on an administrator in a job that he helped to fill in the previous five years. "You try to be an honest broker," he says.

The Changing Search

During basketball season, Mr. Funk unwinds by attending the games of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. He enjoys the frenetic pace of the game and the balletic artistry of "the world's best athletes." Unlike baseball, which bores him, basketball constantly evolves.

So do college presidents and the means used to select them.

"We have this image growing up that the university president is Mr. Chips," says Mr. Funk, referring to the idealized version of a lifelong educator in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips. "That was a fairly legitimate stereotype at one time."

A more accessible cinematic touchstone for contemporary presidents might be Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the 1939 film about the political education of a naïve senator.

The college presidency and the process through which such a job is filled have become markedly more politicized over time, Mr. Funk says. For one thing, the number of politicians seeking and winning top jobs in academe has increased.

And internal politics can sway presidential searches. A small group of trustees with an agenda can determine the outcome of a search, Mr. Funk says. In rare cases a single person can bend a board to his or her will. To offset those forces, Mr. Funk says, he pushes trustees to be open about their agendas. Sometimes, though, the fix is in, and there's not much that can be done about it.

Such was the case with a recent search for a state-university system in the South. "The day I was retained, I got a call saying the search was a done deal," Mr. Funk says. He learned that the governor wanted to give the job to a man who lacked a Ph.D. so that the governor could give the man's former position to someone else. In California the president of an elite university decided midway through the search for a provost that he had found his man. Mr. Funk still collected his full fees in those cases.

At times the fate of presidential aspirants turns on the flimsiest of allegiances. Several candidates for the presidency at North Carolina State University, for example, were rejected by the search committee for being "too blue," code for having attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose trademark powder blue is anathema to students and alumni of N.C. State.

"Occasionally I get depressed about political influence," says Mr. Funk, observing that his proximity to power makes him appear more powerful than he is.

"I accepted long ago that I have the king's ear," he says. "I am not the king."