Hiring university presidents for the Regents’ universities is ultimately the Board of Regents’ responsibility and is one of their most important duties. The process of vetting applicants takes many hours, involves many conversations and much inquiry, and tests a campus’ commitment to fairness, openness, and equality of access.

The twenty-one person search committee at ISU includes faculty, staff, students, and community members, as well as Regents.  The committee has spent a great deal of time, pored over many pages of vitae, and narrowed the field of finalists down to no more than four people who will be on campus October 5, 6, 9, and 10. The search committee members should be thanked for their dedicated service and allowed to pursue that service through the entire search process.

As ISU undergoes the process of selecting our next president, the Regents’ recent experience at University of Iowa cannot be ignored.  Last week’s revelations that former chairman Bruce Rastetter arranged a series of two-person meetings at his home for Regents to recruit Bruce Harreld and to avoid open meetings requirements affirms concerns that already existed because of other unusual aspects of Mr. Harreld’s hiring.

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying “experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”  But another repeated maxim particularly suited to educational institutions is that we can and do learn from our mistakes.  In this instance, we should learn from the University of Iowa experience, whether or not you label it a ‘mistake.’

The ISU community will learn the identity of each finalist no more than 24 hours before that person visits campus. That is a very brief time for ISU family members to do their individual vetting.  Equally brief is the possibility of only one-day visits by the finalists, unless we will have more than one finalist on campus at the same time, with the search committee doing some very deft scheduling. 

Many ISU family members have an interest in this decision and want to be able to meet the finalists, to listen, to ask questions, to get a sense of who the person  who will be holding this key position really is.  More time for the ISU community to interact with finalists would be desirable.  In the absence of greater time and the wider involvement time provides, let us hope that experience is a great teacher for those making the final decision.