MOVING UP

When Openness Compromises Quality

Too much transparency in the search process can lead to bad outcomes for all concerned

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By DENNIS M. BARDEN

Memorandum:

To: The entire campus community; alumni, volunteers, and donors; prospective students and faculty members; and members of the public, both interested and uninterested

From: The president

Re: My career plans

I am writing today to inform everyone that I may be interested in another job. I have been approached by an institution that is looking for a president. The search-committee members think that it is remotely possible that I may be both qualified for their job and a good fit for their campus. I agree that there is the faintest possibility that I might find their job to be interesting enough to consider. I will spend the next several months participating in a process of recruitment and selection that may, or may not, result in my even being interested in accepting the job, much less being seriously considered for it.

In the meantime, everything here will be business as usual. I will continue to do my job to the fullest of my ability, and my responsibilities and authority will be undiminished. That is particularly true in fund raising, so I want all of you with whom I am now or will soon be negotiating large gifts not to concern yourself. I am sure my possible consideration of another position will have no bearing on your decision-making.

Most of all, I am confident that those of you on the campus who might likewise be vaguely willing to consider moving to a new institution will ignore the slight possibility of my own departure when making your career plans.

I am writing this today because I wish to be totally transparent and to keep you all informed of my every waking thought and of every possibility I am considering for my personal and professional future.

***

Of course what presidents would actually write such a memo? To do so would be ludicrous, self-destructive, and guaranteed to undermine their effectiveness, at best, or get them fired, at worst.

But some institutions (or the state laws governing them) require the functional equivalent of such a memo. On other campuses, the strictures of shared governance demand that level of transparency. And in some places where openness is not the norm, powerful forces — most typically the news media or local politicians — agitate to make it so.

And the advocates of transparency all truly believe that such scrutiny will have no adverse effect on the candidate pool of an institution in search of a new leader.

Before those advocates send out the mob with pitchforks, allow me to make an observation: The typical search in higher education is already incredibly open when judged by the standard of the employment marketplace as a whole. Can anyone imagine candidates for the CEO job of a Fortune 500 company spending two days giving an account of themselves in front of every corporate constituency? Would any board member of that company remotely consider canvassing the opinion of the company's full complement of employees and customers to determine the candidate's suitability for the job?

Presidential candidates do that routinely at colleges and universities. Finalists appear in public to be vetted. They subject themselves to marathons of private and public meetings. They give presentations. They answer questions and listen to complaints.

On many levels, it is amazing that experienced, successful, highly educated individuals willingly allow themselves to be analyzed so minutely by the campus community that they will eventually lead. Why do they do it?

Candidates agree to go through that process for a couple of reasons. The most important is that the system usually works. It results in appointments that garner a strong sense of enfranchisement (at least at the outset). It provides those with strong voices with a role (or, at least, a perceived role) in the selection and thereby gives them each some responsibility for the new leader's success. Candidates also submit to this process because it's part of academic culture, the way things are done. It is a necessary aspect of a process of shared governance that is central to the gestalt of higher education.

And they do it because, by the time they are so publicly displayed, they know they are being seriously considered, and they are interested enough to take the job if offered. In short, the potential rewards outweigh the risks.

But what if the possibility of reward were remote?

Imagine asking every candidate — not just the finalists, but every single applicant — to go through the same public process. Now open it up one step further. Imagine making public the names of everyone who even considered applying, everyone whom the institution hoped to interest in the job, everyone whom it asked to submit names for consideration, and everyone whose names were proposed?

Some public institutions do the functional equivalent of exactly that when they conduct an open and transparent search. The cost to the people whose names are made public — regardless of their status as candidates — is high, but the possibility of reward is far, far more speculative.

My search-consultant colleagues and I are hired by institutions, in large measure, to identify and attract outstanding candidates. We reach out to people who are successfully employed in leading institutions (or, in the case of provosts and deans, running substantial portions of institutions) and try to convince them to consider using their experience and talent to lead our client institutions. All we're asking is that they consider it, mind you. Learn more. Engage in discussions leading to decisions as to whether it might be a good idea.

Imagine if that invitation to consider a position came with an "Oh, by the way, if you do agree to consider it, the newspapers — here and in your current hometown — will announce that you are doing so." Do you think a lot of people respond to our inquiry? Would you?

If you think that's hyperbole, it's not. Just within the last year, my colleagues and I worked as consultants to a university president to fill a top position in academic administration. The president instructed us not to send her any e-mail messages at work or call her on the telephone in her office lest those communications be discovered by the media by force of state law. Even if we sent her an e-mail that said something innocuous like, "Hey, what do you think about our trying to attract Dr. X for your search?", she was confident that Dr. X's name would appear in the local newspaper. And if that happened, the odds were slim to none that he would even be willing to consider the job at that point.

Who, then, gains from a completely transparent hiring process? I have little doubt that the intent of sunshine laws and policies is noble. Colleges and universities are public trusts and benefit from public largess, whether in the form of direct subsidy or tax exemptions. The public, therefore, has a right to expect a reasonable level of accountability for the institution's actions.

Newspapers are in the business of selling newspapers; one of the ways they do that is by scooping their competitors. Newspapers and their print and electronic-media counterparts play an important and laudable role in the complex system of checks and balances between the public and the private sectors, too, but they exist to sell their products. That product is oftentimes sold to people who love to know the private goings-on in the lives of others.

But if such openness compromises the quality of candidate pools — and common sense dictates that it must — and the quality of candidate pools directly affects the quality of the ultimate appointee — again, a matter of common sense — and the quality of institutional leadership directly affects the fortunes of the institution, then how does it follow that those laws and policies benefit the institution or the public?

Perhaps the most perverse aspect of all this is the lengths to which institutions must go to avoid the unintended consequences of laws and policies designed to promote openness.

Recently an article appeared in a local newspaper decrying the fact that some consultant colleagues of mine had been hired by a university foundation to conduct a search for a senior executive. This was in a state with a very strong and oft-enforced sunshine law. If my colleagues had been employed by the university, their every action would have been subject to scrutiny by the news media. But by working for the foundation, a private 501(c)(3) organization, their work — which is to say their efforts to identify and attract the best-possible candidates — could stay confidential. Potential candidates could consider their options without fear that they would be "outed." The local news media was not happy about the arrangement.

But the institution's board members were willing to take the heat. They knew this approach was their best, perhaps only, chance to attract a talented pool of candidates. They were right.

We can probably all agree that searches done entirely in secret run counter to the culture and ethos of most institutions and may lead to bad outcomes. I propose that searches done entirely in the open can also lead to bad outcomes.

The hybrid model, the one that is already the norm in most circumstances, is one that exposes only the finalists to public scrutiny. That's the optimal approach for everyone except, perhaps, newspaper publishers, politicians, and conspiracy theorists.

Dennis M. Barden is a senior vice president and director of the higher-education practice at Witt/Kieffer, an executive-search firm that specializes in searches for academic and administrative leaders in academe, health care, and nonprofit organizations. For an archive of his previous Moving Up columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/moving_up.