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By Jennifer Jacobson

If you're interested in the presidential search at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, you don't have to wait for the news media to cover it. Thanks to the Web, you can keep tabs on it yourself.

In seeking a successor to J. Wade Gilley, who resigned in April after 22 months at the helm, the university has joined a new and growing trend: Colleges are creating special Web sites to post information about their presidential searches. These institutions aren't necessarily releasing more details than they did before; they're simply improving access to the information that they already release.The material they are posting includes formal descriptions of the position, news releases chronicling the search, and shortlists of potential candidates.

"It's just such an effective resource and tool," says R. William Funk, managing director of college-presidential searches for Korn/Ferry International, an executive search firm that is a consultant to Tennessee's search. "From presidents to assistant professors to support staff, all of the people we work with in higher education are so Web-savvy that's it's an incredibly effective way to communicate. It's so easy to reach so many people."

In the last two years, he says, officials leading each of the four presidential searches at Big Ten institutions -- Indiana University at Bloomington, Ohio State University, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- created Web sites to keep the public abreast of the process.

So far, Mr. Funk says, the trend has been limited largely to public institutions. In fact, it's becoming increasingly unusual for a public university not to create a Web site for its presidential search, he says. The committees that he works with routinely scout the Web sites of other presidential searches to scope out the competition, get ideas for their own sites, and see if any of their top candidates have been mentioned as finalists elsewhere.

The University of Tennessee has gone one step further by trying to make the Web site for its presidential search more interactive. Not only does the site outline the search plan and name the members of the search committee, it also asks the public for nominations and for suggestions about the process. The university is expected to post additional information as it becomes available, including a position description.

Tennessee's governor, Don Sundquist, a Republican and the chairman of the university's search committee, wanted an "inclusive, professional, and positive" search that sought input from the public at large, says Cathy L. Cole, deputy executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. "We thought of no better way to do this than through establishing a Web site."

Carolyn R. Hodges, a professor of German at Tennessee who is chairwoman of the search committee's advisory council, says the panel hopes the Web site will assure people that "it is an open search, that there's not some agenda that's been decided on in advance."

So far, Tennessee has received more than 100 nominations via the Web site, says Mr. Funk. His firm notifies all candidates, whether they were nominated online or through more traditional routes, and inquires whether they would like to apply for the job. Most of the nominations have been serious. "You'll occasionally get Mickey Mouse or George Bush or Colonel Sanders," he says, but "it's very rare."

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, which created a Web site for its search for a new chancellor, is one of the few other institutions to offer the public the opportunity to nominate candidates online. It also enabled potential candidates to nominate themselves confidentially, says David Musolf, secretary of the faculty at Wisconsin.

Ultimately the university promoted John D. Wiley, its provost for six years, who took over as chancellor in January. He was not nominated via the Web site.

Not everyone is a fan of such sites. Bernice Durand, a professor of physics at Madison and chairwoman of its chancellor's search committee, says she had mixed feelings about it. "It was helpful because it broadened the search. On the other hand, it was a nuisance -- one more thing to keep track of." Ms. Durand says she had to check the confidential account for the site regularly and read all the nominations, some of which were "junk," she says. "I responded to everything just so nobody could say I didn't."

Few institutions have conducted live chats and interviews with their presidential candidates on the Web, but Mr. Funk predicts that more and more will do so. Still, he doesn't think the searches will become more public than they are now.

"The searches at the presidential level do best when confidentiality is maintained," Mr. Funk says. "It would be detrimental to have the full list of candidates there. Sitting presidents don't want people to know they're candidates for another job. It's thought of as disloyal. Funny how boards are jealous that way."