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Iowa trustees abdicate authority
Cornell University has been struggling with governance issues for some time; last year, tensions between the Cornell trustees and university president Jeffrey Lehman grew so serious that Lehman decided to step down. Since then, Hunter Rawlings has served as interim president while Cornell conducted a search for a new president amid vociferous criticism about the terms upon which Lehman left. That new president has been found--current University of Iowa president David Skorton will take up his new post in Ithaca in three months' time. And while Cornell looks forward to what will hopefully be a new, more peaceable administrative era, Skorton's departure is exposing fault lines in Iowa's own approach to governance.
ACTA president Anne Neal's recent letter to the editor of the Des Moines Register explains in full:
As U of I President David Skorton heads to Cornell, the Iowa Board of Regents has a most important job: finding an outstanding leader to take the reins of the state's flagship university.But if plans announced come to pass ("U of I: President Needs University Support," March 12), the regents will have abdicated their most important responsibility.
Faculty, staff and students have proposed a gigantic presidential search committee - 23 to be exact - that would include only two regents, 11 faculty members, three staff, three students and two alumni.
That's no way to pick a president. Effective boards understand the tradition of shared governance - the participation of faculty, and sometimes students, in developing policies that affect academic life - but don't confuse the value of that tradition with their own ultimate authority. The presidential selection committee should consist solely or primarily of trustees, and should be chaired by a trustee.
While it is imperative that a variety of external constituencies be included, they need not sit on the search committee. Indeed, an effective search committee should be small. The larger the group, the more vetoes there are. The more vetoes there are, the more likely the final candidates will represent the lowest common denominator - mediocrity.
There are simply too many constituencies to include without making the committee too large. And it is questionable to what extent one professor or one alumnus "represents" all faculty or alumni.
While faculty, staff and others have much to offer, they cannot be counted on to bring the larger perspective - the public interest - to bear. That's what the regents were appointed to do; and that's why they need to be in charge.
Skorton, who has declined raises out of respect for the low salaries of UI faculty, says he will devote his final weeks at Iowa to working with the state legislature on budgeting issues and on raises for UI faculty. Perhaps it would be impolitic for him to criticize the proposed mechanism for choosing his successor; perhaps, too, the university will be too caught up in scandal management to consider more carefully how the search for the next Iowa president will proceed. But one hopes that both suppositions are false, and that Skorton--who deflects discussion about what sort of legacy he will leave at Iowa--thinks enough about the future of the school to recognize that one of the best last things he could do as president of the University of Iowa is to insist that the search for the next president be conducted in a manner that is likely to lead to the hiring of the best candidate available. The proposed arrangement, as Neal explains, is not at all likely to have that result.
One good sign: University of Iowa regent Teresa Wahlert will head the search committee.
Posted by acta online at April 3, 2006 09:26 AM
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