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Honesty in the Search Process

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By Jean Dowdall

In recent years, we have seen dishonesty in many areas of American life, including the academic world: Everyone from college presidents to coaches lying about their degrees, foreign students forging information on transcripts when they seek admission to American universities, plagiarism by students and presidents alike, and even a professor deceiving students about his wartime experience.

In the context of advancing your career in college and university administration, there are many opportunities to put a positive "spin" on a less-than-positive situation, to mislead others through distortions or omissions, or to tell outright lies. It is easy to say "just don't do it," but apparently it is difficult for some to resist the temptation, as the many stories of infractions reveal.

What standard of honesty should you follow? And if you violate those standards, what should you do?

I do not wish to be an arbiter of these standards. Instead, I will take a practical approach and focus on how search committees or appointing officers will most likely react to misbehavior by candidates. But candidates aren't the only ones who lie in the search process: I will also offer some observations about search committees that deceive candidates about key elements of the search.

A reputation for integrity and honesty is an essential element of a professional identity. In the academy, where we teach students about honesty, we are expected to practice what we preach. When infractions are identified, they are typically treated with great seriousness. When search committees feel they have been misled, they react with considerable anger, as do candidates misled by a search committee.

The most common deception by candidates in the search process is to fail to let the search committee know that they are no longer in a position that they recently held. If you have been terminated or encouraged to leave, this is a particular problem, but it can be a concern even if you believe you left your position freely, particularly if others might interpret your departure differently.

It is essential that the search committee learn about your exit from you. More than once, I have discovered an administrative departure during reference calls, long after the candidate had an opportunity to let me know of his changed situation but didn't do so. If you tell the consultant or the committee yourself, you have the opportunity not only to claim the moral high ground, but also to tell the story in a way that shows your candor, your ability to take responsibility for what you may have contributed to the problem that led to your stepping down, your ability to avoid blaming others, and so on.

Describing an unpleasant departure isn't easy, since it can be both very emotional and very complex. You will want to think carefully (perhaps out loud with a trusted colleague) about how to give your account in a way that is honest and clear. Practice telling the story until you are comfortable with it.

However you tell it, you will have to do it yourself if you want to be respected by the search committee. If the committee members can get past the concerns that your story may raise, they will probably want to talk with others to validate your perspective. If you seriously distort the truth, it will most likely be countered by others, so it is essential that you provide as accurate an account as you can.

Telling the story yourself is your opportunity to acknowledge other perspectives, to note the areas of ambiguity in the facts, to explain why others might be critical of you, and generally to contextualize the bare facts (i.e., that you were terminated) with some broader understanding (e.g., the institution had had five provosts in three years before you arrived).

But neglecting to disclose a recent termination is just one of the ways that candidates deceive search committees. Another is when candidates withhold information about previous terminations. Are you obliged to reveal, for example, that you held a position for less than a year and were terminated from it? I would say yes, you are. Although I have seen corporate people on a search committee brush aside an omission of this kind in the résumé of a corporate candidate, I think that academic people would be less charitable about such an omission from an academic's résumé.

It is difficult to grasp how anyone would think he or she could get away with lying about their academic credentials. Degree verification is simple, and it is standard practice, especially in the wake of so many reports of people claiming to hold degrees they don't have. If, for some reason, you have done this in the past, I can only urge that you come clean and undo the error as soon as you can, hoping that your candor will help to avoid the otherwise normal and serious consequences.

I have heard about other, more creative forms of deception as well. For example, I was told of an administrator who, having interviewed a candidate, was moving into the final negotiations on salary, when he learned that the candidate had already accepted a position elsewhere and that the other appointment was being announced in The Chronicle. This is the kind of situation that naturally enrages people at the second institution, and while they may have little opportunity to vent their rage, since the candidate obviously doesn't need a job anymore, higher education is a small world. This kind of thing can come back to haunt you when you least expect it.

Let me turn now to the dishonesty of search committees. In some sense, this kind of dishonesty is just the same as that of the candidate. Candidates may fear that, if the search committee knew the key facts about them (e.g., lack of important degrees, termination from other positions), they would be dropped from the search. Committees similarly may fear that if candidates know the truth about the position or the institution, they will immediately lose interest in the search.

The most common committee deceptions, in my observation, surround an institution's financial health and its campus culture. Some committees are reluctant to lay out the full magnitude of a college's financial challenges. They may avoid mention of deficits and may hesitate to allow any but the final candidates to see audited financial statements. In some cases, new presidents have told me after taking office that the chief financial officer had held back troubling information from the board and the search committee, leaving the president to discover it long after the search was over.

Deceptions about culture are very different. There are some institutions where deep schisms exist between the faculty and the administration -- every decision leads to a grievance, and personal attack is a normal form of discourse. Search-committee members may be unaware of the culture, but often they do know and are simply unwilling to air this dirty linen in the presence of outsiders.

What can you do if you feel the search committee has deceived you? The best solution, of course, is to avoid the problem at all by making sure you ask hard questions, listen carefully to the answers, and then gather information independently. Take responsibility for informing yourself as fully as possible before you accept the offer.

If you've already accepted when you discover you've been misled, you will need to make a judgment about how serious the discrepancy is between what you were told and what you now know. You may be angry or annoyed, but in most cases, there will be little you can do unless you want to quit the job. When deception has occurred, candidates have less recourse than institutions, which can fire someone who is misleading on an application.

I tell my institutional clients -- just as I tell candidates -- that honesty and candor are valued commodities. Even troubled institutions are attractive to candidates who are eager for a challenge. Candidates who have experience at such institutions may be even more seasoned as a result.

However, going along with that candor, there must be a tolerance of limitations and missteps. If the committee expects the candidate to disclose the black marks on his or her record, it should also understand that most administrators who have done anything at all have enemies or at least critics, and that sometimes their good-faith administrative actions result in terminations. That doesn't mean they aren't very capable administrators.

Similarly, if search committees reveal the most serious challenges associated with the position they are seeking to fill, they are hoping that the candidate will be willing to consider the position, warts and all, and the strength that he or she can bring to it.

Honesty in the search process requires greater tolerance and openness from both candidate and committee.