The recent search for the next Iowa State University president has been a long one. We waited as they narrowed the candidates down to 16, then to four, then to the final two. When I first learned of the final two candidates, Steven Leath and Kumble Subbaswamy, I was disappointed not to see a woman in the pool. Then, after the announcement of Steven Leath as the 15th ISU president, another concern arose in some conflicts of interest with a certain member of the Board of Regents and the new president. These two issues make me question not the candidate, but certain aspects of the search.

To be clear, Leath seems like a highly qualified candidate. He has extensive research background in Agricultural topics, a good public presence, and experience with land grant institutions. I’m sure that his experience in fundraising was a large pull due to the current situation of the university’s budget. However, the search committee stated that they were looking for a candidate that could be a long-term leader for the university, so the fundraising experience technically shouldn’t have been the deciding factor if we are looking for long term leadership.

Leath’s strong background in research and attracting research money to the university is certainly appealing but at a university with a 43 percent female student population, it is disappointing not to see our faculty and administration reflect that percent.

In fact, only 25 percent of tenured faculty is women. With 55 percent non-tenure eligible faculty and 41 percent tenure eligible faculty being women seeing only 25 percent actually receiving tenure brings questions of sexism to mind, not only in the presidential search but in the general practices of the university.

While I don’t know what the make-up of the final sixteen candidates was, the fact that the final pool only consisted of males makes it stands to reason that the group boasted more males than females or that the males in the group were favored. Either option isn’t very encouraging.

An excuse that is commonly used in politics is that there aren’t enough women to choose from for the positions. However, in the instance of the next university president, I find this rather difficult to believe. The University of Illinois, Penn State and University of Nebraska all have female vice presidents (or comparable positions) and the University of Iowa has a female president. Iowa State itself has a very high number of women working in higher up university administration positions. Executive Vice President and Provost Elizabeth Hoffman, Executive Assistant to the President Tahira Hira, and State Government Relations Officer Ann McCarthy all play a large role in the university. Somehow, a man has still always held the top office of president.

Instances such as this are always difficult to gauge as the scenarios are always different. Maybe the male applicants in this situation truly were the best candidates. Maybe there just weren’t the women to apply for the job. Most likely, the pipeline of professors working their way up in the administration just isn’t feeding us the number of females required to fill these positions as is demonstrated by the low percentages of women in tenured positions.

But, despite whatever the situation was, I and more than 12,000 other female students at this university are still not being represented in our faculty and administration.

The second problem I saw with the process came down to the final day of the search and final deliberation by the Board of Regents.

Last May, Governor Terry Branstad asked the President of the Board of Regents, David Miles, along with the President Pro Tem, Jack Evans, to step down from their leadership roles on the Board. This request goes unprecedented as the Board of Regents in certainly not a group intended to serve at the will of the governor. Before this request was made, three new Board members were appointed by the governor, Nicole Carroll, Katie Mulholland, and Bruce Rastetter. All of the new members have shown support of Republican candidates in the past although Carroll is a registered Independent and Mulholland has changed her affiliation with various caucuses and is currently a registered Democrat. Rastetter, however, has always been supportive of the Republican party and just so happened to be the single largest donor to the Branstad gubernatorial campaign.

These appointments were all questionable at the time as they all replaced Democratic board members. With the new appointment of Steven Leath as the Iowa State University President, it is possible that we have now seen the impact of these appointments in the choice.

Moreover, with Board of Regent’s members such as Bruce Rastetter, who is CEO of a bio fuel company [corrected from: who happens to own a bio fuel company] that produces 450 million gallons of ethanol per year, it isn’t too surprising that another old white guy joined the “Good Ole Boys” club. Leath’s background includes research in bio fuels and plant pathology, two topics, which seem oddly beneficial to Mr. Rastetter’s own interests.

The problem with this process is that there is a lot that we don’t know, now or possibly ever. There are many different factors going into the process, but when two issues like sexism and mixing business with politics come up, we need to call attention to them.