Echoing continued criticism from groups within the University of Iowa community, a national group of professors has denounced the recent search for a new UI president as a “crude exercise of naked power” on behalf of the Iowa Board of Regents.
The American Association of University Professors issued a report Thursday concluding that the process leading up to the Sept. 3 hire of UI President Bruce Harreld “was tainted from the start.” The group also offered full-throated support for the UI Faculty Senate’s earlier "no confidence" assessment that the regents had shown “blatant disregard for the shared nature of university governance.”
“... The search was structured and engineered by the regents’ leadership from the outset to identify a figure from the business world congenial to (the board's) image of ‘transformative leadership,’ ” report writers Matthew Finkin and Michael Decesare noted. “Once such a person was identified, the rest of what followed was only an illusion of an open, honest search.”
The report finds that the search process wasted the time, energy, resources and reputation of the members of the UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee and of the three other finalists who were brought to campus in late August for public interviews.
The seven-month process to replace former UI President Sally Mason cost more than $308,000, with the bulk of the money going for the fees and expenses incurred by Parker Executive Search, the Atlanta-based consultant hired by the regents to recruit and vet candidates.
“We believe we ran a fair and transparent search process for president at the University of Iowa,” Regents Bruce Rastetter and Katie Mulholland wrote in response to an AAUP request for comment on an earlier draft of the report. “Due to a matter of pending litigation, Board members and Board office staff have been advised by legal counsel to not provide additional comment.”
Harreld likewise had no comments to add to the draft report, noting that he thought the parts concerning his role were factually correct.
"As I move forward as the president of the University of Iowa, please know I will continue to respect and engage in the shared governance at this institution,” he wrote.
No meaningful role in the selection
The release of the report comes about six weeks after AAUP officials visited the UI campus to conduct interviews with individuals connected with the search. The regent leadership, along with then-interim UI President Jean Robillard, declined to participate in the investigation, citing a pending open government lawsuit against the search process.
Harreld, who did not start as president until more than two weeks after the AAUP officials' visit, also did not participate in the interviews.
“We doubtless would have benefited by having been able to explore these events directly with them,” the report states. “Nevertheless, we do not believe their refusals (to participate) have prevented the committee from securing a reasonable grasp of these events and of their larger implications.”
The investigators concluded that the regents, who have the authority to hire anyone they deem qualified to be UI president, constructed a search process in a way “to preclude any meaningful faculty role in the selection of the final candidate.”
Although seven regular faculty members were included on the 21-member UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee, the committee was unexpectedly dismissed in August after recommending four finalists for the position. Those finalists included a sitting college president, two university provosts and Harreld, who is described by the report writers as “an independent business consultant who had previously occupied corporate office and had served as a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School.”
The report points out that over the strenuous objection of at least four faculty members on the committee, Harreld’s name was forwarded into the semi-finalist round immediately after his application. His application materials, the report states, consisted of only a 2½-page resume.
It didn’t come out until weeks after Harreld’s hiring that the three regents on the search committee, along with two other members of the nine-member oversight board, had met with Harreld over the summer in separate meetings in either Iowa City or Ames. The final meetings took place the day before the committee began evaluating applications.
None of the other three finalists had been granted such access to a majority of the board members.
Raising accreditation concerns
The report writers also dismissed the rhetoric of crisis and urgency in which the regents have explained why they chose Harreld, as an expert in organizational transformation, over three more experienced university administrators. The writers described the rationale behind the hiring as bearing “an eerie similarity to the aborted attempt by the Board of Visitors in the University of Virginia, to remove its president in 2012.”
The AAUP was in the process of considering sanctions against the Virginia university system when the decision was reversed and the President Teresa Sullivan was given her job back. Virginia's accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, also intervened in that case.
The report writers suggest that UI's accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, consider intervening in a similar manner over Harreld's hiring.
"The silence of the Higher Learning Commission has been deafening," the report writers added in a footnote.
Katherine Tachau, a UI history professor and UI AAUP chapter president, said the national AAUP's findings may persuade members of the UI community to file a formal complaint with the commission to argue that the regents' search process violated the commission's policies on faculty participation in governance.
When contacted Wednesday, commission officials said they are not authorized to discuss personnel decisions at a university or to disclose complaints that are made.
Likelihood of sanctions
The scathing tone of the AAUP report on the hiring of University of Iowa president Bruce Harreld increases the likelihood that the AAUP members may vote next summer to sanction the Iowa Board of Regents. That decision would add the board to a list of six institutions in which the association has determined that “unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist.” The board currently has 56 institutions on its censure list for violations of tenure and academic freedom.
In 2012 and 2013, for example, the AAUP conducted an investigation into plans to cut programs at the University of Northern Iowa. AAUP officials describe that case, however, as an example in which the university administration worked with the association “to avoid letting actions stand that would have doubtless resulted in censure.”
"Whatever sanctions may be decided in this case, they should apply only to the Board of Regents, and not to any of the public universities," said Joe Gorton, president of UNI's faculty union, United Faculty/AAUP.
Although there are no direct consequences to an institution or board for being sanctioned or censured, being included on the list is a black-eye for any group attempting to adhere to the principles of shared governance and academic freedom, said Gregory Sholtz, associate secretary and director for the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance.
“We’ve found that those institutions that are more on the periphery of higher education care the least about such sanctions,” Sholtz said. “But those institutions who are more central to higher education care far more about being seen as following sound academic practices.”
Should the committee chose to impose sanctions against the Iowa regents, Sholtz said it’s unclear to him exactly what steps could be taken eventually to remove the sanction – short of a complete turnover on the nine-member board. That turnover, he said, would need to be followed by having the state government put in place additional policies to ensure the qualifications and training of future regents.
http://www.press-citizen.com/story/...i-search-crude-exercise-naked-power/77008562/
The American Association of University Professors issued a report Thursday concluding that the process leading up to the Sept. 3 hire of UI President Bruce Harreld “was tainted from the start.” The group also offered full-throated support for the UI Faculty Senate’s earlier "no confidence" assessment that the regents had shown “blatant disregard for the shared nature of university governance.”
“... The search was structured and engineered by the regents’ leadership from the outset to identify a figure from the business world congenial to (the board's) image of ‘transformative leadership,’ ” report writers Matthew Finkin and Michael Decesare noted. “Once such a person was identified, the rest of what followed was only an illusion of an open, honest search.”
The report finds that the search process wasted the time, energy, resources and reputation of the members of the UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee and of the three other finalists who were brought to campus in late August for public interviews.
The seven-month process to replace former UI President Sally Mason cost more than $308,000, with the bulk of the money going for the fees and expenses incurred by Parker Executive Search, the Atlanta-based consultant hired by the regents to recruit and vet candidates.
“We believe we ran a fair and transparent search process for president at the University of Iowa,” Regents Bruce Rastetter and Katie Mulholland wrote in response to an AAUP request for comment on an earlier draft of the report. “Due to a matter of pending litigation, Board members and Board office staff have been advised by legal counsel to not provide additional comment.”
Harreld likewise had no comments to add to the draft report, noting that he thought the parts concerning his role were factually correct.
"As I move forward as the president of the University of Iowa, please know I will continue to respect and engage in the shared governance at this institution,” he wrote.
No meaningful role in the selection
The release of the report comes about six weeks after AAUP officials visited the UI campus to conduct interviews with individuals connected with the search. The regent leadership, along with then-interim UI President Jean Robillard, declined to participate in the investigation, citing a pending open government lawsuit against the search process.
Harreld, who did not start as president until more than two weeks after the AAUP officials' visit, also did not participate in the interviews.
“We doubtless would have benefited by having been able to explore these events directly with them,” the report states. “Nevertheless, we do not believe their refusals (to participate) have prevented the committee from securing a reasonable grasp of these events and of their larger implications.”
The investigators concluded that the regents, who have the authority to hire anyone they deem qualified to be UI president, constructed a search process in a way “to preclude any meaningful faculty role in the selection of the final candidate.”
Although seven regular faculty members were included on the 21-member UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee, the committee was unexpectedly dismissed in August after recommending four finalists for the position. Those finalists included a sitting college president, two university provosts and Harreld, who is described by the report writers as “an independent business consultant who had previously occupied corporate office and had served as a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School.”
The report points out that over the strenuous objection of at least four faculty members on the committee, Harreld’s name was forwarded into the semi-finalist round immediately after his application. His application materials, the report states, consisted of only a 2½-page resume.
It didn’t come out until weeks after Harreld’s hiring that the three regents on the search committee, along with two other members of the nine-member oversight board, had met with Harreld over the summer in separate meetings in either Iowa City or Ames. The final meetings took place the day before the committee began evaluating applications.
None of the other three finalists had been granted such access to a majority of the board members.
Raising accreditation concerns
The report writers also dismissed the rhetoric of crisis and urgency in which the regents have explained why they chose Harreld, as an expert in organizational transformation, over three more experienced university administrators. The writers described the rationale behind the hiring as bearing “an eerie similarity to the aborted attempt by the Board of Visitors in the University of Virginia, to remove its president in 2012.”
The AAUP was in the process of considering sanctions against the Virginia university system when the decision was reversed and the President Teresa Sullivan was given her job back. Virginia's accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, also intervened in that case.
The report writers suggest that UI's accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, consider intervening in a similar manner over Harreld's hiring.
"The silence of the Higher Learning Commission has been deafening," the report writers added in a footnote.
Katherine Tachau, a UI history professor and UI AAUP chapter president, said the national AAUP's findings may persuade members of the UI community to file a formal complaint with the commission to argue that the regents' search process violated the commission's policies on faculty participation in governance.
When contacted Wednesday, commission officials said they are not authorized to discuss personnel decisions at a university or to disclose complaints that are made.
Likelihood of sanctions
The scathing tone of the AAUP report on the hiring of University of Iowa president Bruce Harreld increases the likelihood that the AAUP members may vote next summer to sanction the Iowa Board of Regents. That decision would add the board to a list of six institutions in which the association has determined that “unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist.” The board currently has 56 institutions on its censure list for violations of tenure and academic freedom.
In 2012 and 2013, for example, the AAUP conducted an investigation into plans to cut programs at the University of Northern Iowa. AAUP officials describe that case, however, as an example in which the university administration worked with the association “to avoid letting actions stand that would have doubtless resulted in censure.”
"Whatever sanctions may be decided in this case, they should apply only to the Board of Regents, and not to any of the public universities," said Joe Gorton, president of UNI's faculty union, United Faculty/AAUP.
Although there are no direct consequences to an institution or board for being sanctioned or censured, being included on the list is a black-eye for any group attempting to adhere to the principles of shared governance and academic freedom, said Gregory Sholtz, associate secretary and director for the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance.
“We’ve found that those institutions that are more on the periphery of higher education care the least about such sanctions,” Sholtz said. “But those institutions who are more central to higher education care far more about being seen as following sound academic practices.”
Should the committee chose to impose sanctions against the Iowa regents, Sholtz said it’s unclear to him exactly what steps could be taken eventually to remove the sanction – short of a complete turnover on the nine-member board. That turnover, he said, would need to be followed by having the state government put in place additional policies to ensure the qualifications and training of future regents.
http://www.press-citizen.com/story/...i-search-crude-exercise-naked-power/77008562/
