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For Open Dialogue

RECONSIDERING THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARCH

tHANKS TO THE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 ISSUE OF this magazine, the Cornell community now has a plausible account of President Jeffrey Lehman's resignation. For Lehman and the trustees, does strict adherence to their confidentiality agreement--evoking the relationship between a corporation and its CEO rather more than that of a university with its president--still make sense? Might they not enhance the campus community's current celebration of open hearts and open minds with a commitment to open dialogue?

On September 14, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution deploring the University's secrecy and urging the trustees "to engage in a frank and open dialogue with the faculty"; it referred to the University Faculty Committee a second resolution calling for a commission that would "study the governance structures of U.S. colleges and universities to identify the major alternative models of faculty involvement in university decision making that might inform changes in governance at Cornell." The emergence of the governance issue in tandem with expressions of the faculty's displeasure at being left out of the evaluation of presidential performance reflects a climate of mistrust that compounds the difficulty of searching for a new president. The administration also offered faculty members a look at a draft of "The Cornell Opportunity," the prospectus for the search. It neither acknowledged the difficulty nor alluded to the task of restoring trust in our community that our next president will face.

In an essay on the University Faculty Website and a commentary in the Daily Sun, I have suggested that an obvious vehicle for rebuilding trust in the near term is the presidential search. But is the model we have used in the recent past right for the present circumstances? Should we not consider a fresh strategy? My questions were driven by a comparison of our search committee-- twenty-four members, decisively dominated by the eighteen trustees, fourteen of whom do not belong to a campus constituency-- to those of two competitors ranked above us by U.S. News & World Report: Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania. Their most recent search committees--of eighteen and twenty-one members respectively--resembled ours structurally. However, they included a larger complement of faculty, and their trustee contingents did not hold a voting majority. The contrast becomes more pronounced when we examine the model used at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. In each of these institutions, there is a trustee committee and a separate on-campus advisory committee that makes recommendations to the trustee group. In all three cases, the independent on-campus group holds an influential position and can orient the search toward the academic community's concerns. At Michigan, moreover, after the advisory committee presents its list of prospects, the trustees choose finalists to be invited to campus for interviews in public, and they then consider the community's response in making their choice.

These approaches not only show that there are viable options other than the one we have used in recent searches, but also suggest that Cornell's trustees could prudently give representatives of the campus community a more prominent role in the search process. In the five institutions I've cited, the trustees' willingness to enter into a relationship of collegiality and relative parity is exemplary, for it expresses real confidence in the judgment of those who represent on-campus constituencies. With this in mind, it is important for our trustees to examine critically their response to a huge outpouring of faculty protest at an August 30 campus meeting with search committee members. The gesture of increasing the number of faculty members on the search committee from three to five and of allowing a small group of faculty to meet with the final candidates and share their opinions with the search committee is a welcome sign of attention to our concerns. Nonetheless, since it can have no more than a marginal impact on a process in which trustee control is paramount, it also smacks of tokenism.

Can we imagine a search model anchored in values we associate with Cornell--openness, transparency, community, diversity-- that would enact a renewal of intra-institutional trust? To my mind, a forward-looking strategy would entail two adjustments: restructuring the search committee to give it a membership balance like those at Penn and Duke, and modeling the final stage of the search on our dean's searches, in which all the concerned faculty can attend a meeting with the finalists and, after open discussion, convey their preferences to the search committee. Conventional wisdom objects that good prospects will decline to be candidates if the searching university does not guarantee them secrecy. Yet the record of Michigan's recent searches suggests that publicly visible finalists for the presidency of a great university, far from harming themselves, attract positive attention to their merit and gain respect for acknowledging their willingness to move up the professional ladder. At the same time,Michigan's experience suggests that the candidate who is selected benefits from being the community's choice, and also that the institution itself is strengthened by its boldly consultative process.With work on issues of governance clearly on our institutional agenda, our leaders should be prepared to consider the benefits of a judiciously conceived shift toward a more open and broadly participatory search.

-- Philip Lewis
Professor of Romance Studies

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