When asked about the unusually high turnover recently at Mississippi’s public universities, Higher Education Commissioner Alfred Rankins Jr. suggested that he and the College Board to which he reports were on top of things.
“The Board has implemented strategies to attract and retain institutional executive offices like a refined presidential search process that encourages applying without fear of reprisal from current employers and a more competitive compensation structure,” Rankins said.
It is, however, the presidential search process — and in particular it’s secretive, insular nature — that may be at the heart of the problem.
When people don’t work out in the jobs for which they were hired, it’s often because the hiring decision was flawed in the first place. The College Board can hardly use its track record with presidents to say secrecy is working as expected.
Here’s what has happened just since 2018.
Alcorn State and Jackson State universities have turned over the presidency twice each. The presidents at the University of Mississippi and Delta State University were apparently pushed out, and the president at the University of Southern Mississippi left almost a year earlier than had been previously announced. Four of these vacancies have occurred in just the past year. The reasons behind much of this turnover have not been publicly disclosed.
It’s true that Mississippi’s public universities aren’t the only ones having trouble finding the right leadership fit. Four private colleges in the state have turned over the president’s job at least once during the last five years. And nationally, the stability in the president’s office has been trending downward, with the average tenure now less than six years.
Still, the College Board’s preoccupation with secrecy when hiring a president raises the odds that it won’t work out because the vetting is not thorough enough and the public buy-in for the decision is lacking.
In addition, according to the online publication Inside Higher Ed, Mississippi is unique in that it distances faculty members from the search process. They can give feedback to the College Board as to the type of leadership they would like to see, but they don’t get to interview or even meet the next president until the College Board has settled on its choice.
The argument that the College Board gives for keeping presidential searches under wraps is that it increases the quality of applicants because candidates don’t have to worry about their current employers knowing they have applied for another job unless they actually get it.
In a recent interview with the Clarion Ledger, Roger Parrot, the dean of Mississippi college presidents with 27 years on the job at private Belhaven University, said while he has no inside knowledge of the College Board’s search process, he does come down on the side of keeping it secret, calling it “the best of the bad options.”
There is, though, a middle ground between total secrecy and total transparency. That’s the middle ground many other states follow. They don’t release the names of all the applicants, but they do release the names of their handful of finalists. It lets faculty, staff, students and anyone else with a vested interest in the school know who is being seriously considered. It provides an avenue for public input — and better ensures that nothing in the candidate’s background has been overlooked — before a final decision is reached.
Even if such modest openness reduces the pool of applicants a little, that’s a worthwhile tradeoff if it reduces the level of presidential turnover, and the instability that comes with it.
