DOCUMENT RESUME ED 334 878 HE 024 404 AUTHOR McLaughlin, Judith Block; Riesman, David TITLE Choosing a College President: Opportunities and Constraints. INSTITUTION Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement ofTeaching, Princeton, NJ. REPORT NO ISBN-0-931050-40-5 PUB DATE 90 NOTE 403p. AVAILABLE FROM Princeton UniverLity Press, 3175 Princeton Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 ($8.00). PUB TYPE Information Analyses (070) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC17 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Administrator Evaluation; Admiristrator Qualifications; *Administrator Selection;*College Presidents; Colleges; *Confidentiality;*Consultants; Disclosure; Higher Education; Leadership; Recruitment; *Search Committees (Personnel); Universities IDENTIFIERS Rice University TX; University of Florida; Winthrop College SC ABSTRACT This book examines the search and selectionprocess for college and university presidents in itsvariety and intricacy. Chapter I examines the question of theimportance of presidents and searches. Chapter II describes theprocess of presidential succession at a private liberal arts college. ChapterIII discusses the tasks required at the start of the search. Chapter IVillustrates the importance of confidentiality Ly presenting,in disguised form, the search process for a president ofa flagship state university. In Chapter V the authors discuss conflictsover privacy and publicity in the search process and in Americansociety generally. Chapter VI presents an account of the 1983 search at theUniversity of Florida in the glare of Florida's open meetingand open records laws. Chapter VII examines the significance of disclosurelaws. Chapter VIII describes the Winthrop Cillege (South Carolina)search conducted with the help of a consultant. The followingchapter goes on to explore the implications of consultants in searchprocesses. Chapter X describes the Rice University (Texas) searchprocess and illuminates the ways in which members ofa search committee can court a candidate. Chapter XI examines the two-wayprocess in which candidate and institution Aust each choose and be chosen.Over 250 references and an index are included. (JB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** n ,,, 4. I its, I GO cf.) V.) I ' I c.:=. P:.14 I BEST T IN - 0^a N.. "PEHMISbION TO REPRODUCE THIS U El DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Ma e of rclutalional Research and imprOyer-ient MATFRIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY I EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Carnegie Foundation ig Thisdocument has been renroduced as feceiypO from the person or organdation originating it for the Advancement of r Minor changes haye peen made to iriproye Teaching reproduction Quality TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES Points ot view or opmons staled in thiSdocu ment do not necessarily r esprit oniciel INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)" OERI position ot policy 2 CHOOSING A COLLEGE PRESIDENT 3 A SPECIAL REPORT ChoosingaCollege President OPPORTUNITIES ANDCONSTRAINTS JUDITH BLOCK McLAUGHLINAND DAVID RIESMAN WITH A FOREWORD BY ERNEST L. BOYER ICE THE CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENTOF TEACHING 5 IVY LANE, PRINCETON,NEW JERSEY 08540 4 Copyright 1990 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching This report is publishedas part of the effort by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teachingto explore significant issues in education. The views expressed shouldnot necessarily be ascribed to individual members of the Board of Trustees of TheCarnegie Foundation. Copyright under International Pah-Americanand Universal Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced in anje formexcept for brief quotations(not to exceed 1,000 words) ina review or professional workwithout permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData McLaughlin, Judith Block, 1948 Choosing a college president: opportunities and constraints / Judith Block McLaughlin and David Riesman; with a foreword by Ernest L. Boyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-931050-40-5 1. College presidentsUnited StatesSelectionand app. intment. 2. College presidentsUnited StatesSelectionand appointmentCase studies. I. Riesman, David, 1909 . II. Title. LH2341.M3651990 378.1'11dc20 90-47689 Copies are available from the PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 3175 Princeton Pike Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648 To Ted McLaughlin andEvelyn Riesrnan 6 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iX FOREWORD BY ERNEST L. BOYER XV INTRODUCTION Xxi i. Do Searches Matter? 1 "Abbott College" 25 Getting Utukr Way 53 "Southern State University" 83 v. Confidentiality and Disclosure 115 VI. University of Florida 143 The Significance of Sunshine Laws 165 Winthrop College 191 The Use of Consultants 225 x. Rice University 263 xi. Reaching Closure 293 XII. The Multiple Meanings of Searches 335 APPENDIX 345 BIBLIOGRAPHY 351 INDEX 369 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THIS BOOt.had its origins in 1980, somewhere over New England, in a conversation on an airplane flight from Toronto to Boston. The two of us had just attended a meeting of the Nati( nal Academy of Education. Judith McLaughlin was then serving as executive director of this association; David Riesman was one of the Academy's founding members. A doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Educa- tion, !With McLaughlin was writing her dissertation on the subject of confidentiality and disclosure in the presidential search, a topic in which David Riesman had long been interested. This chance discovery of our mutual interest in the searchprocess for college and university presidents led to a collaboration on research and writing that has lasted more than ten years. And this volume is in every sense a collaborative effort. The discussion chapters in particular have been rewritten and revised so many times that no paragraph remains which is of one authorship only. Choosing a College President isa blend of our data, analyses, and writing, and the book hasgrown out of this synthesis of our individual contributions. But, while this book began with a conversation between two people, it is the out-growth of conversations with many, many others. During our ten years Gf studying searches, we have spoken and corresponded with literally hundreds of people, whose accounts of their experiences have fur- thered our understanding of the dynamics of the presidential search and the larger issues of leadership and governance. In this Acknowledgments section, we want to thank all of these people, without whose generosity in sharing their experiences and insights this book could not havecome into being. From the beginning of our joint research, we agreed on the crucialques- tion of confidentiality, not only as a topic of inquiry in higher education and in the wider society, but also as a mandate to ourselves in proceeding with our inquiry. We promised informants to keep confidential what we learned from them, scrupulously checking with individuals before we cited them concerning something they had told us. Correspondingly, we cannot acknowledge here by name the wonderfully cooperative trustees, faculty members, administrators, students, and journalists who helped us to un- derstand the search processes in which they were participants or observ- ers. In many cases, these people spentseveral hours in interviews with one or both of us, and then additional time reviewingearly drafts of our stories about their searches. Similarly, we will not name here individually the countless candidates for presidential positions with whom we have spoken, both those who were successful and those who werc not (and many of the latter became, eventually, one ofthe former), with whom we have spoken, but we are much indebted to them for their candor, reflec- tions, ard time. Early in our work together, we discovered what today can be called the consultant industry, that is, those individuals whose line of work involves advising boards of trustees and search committees on the search and selec- tion process. As we came to know some of the more observant search consultants, we found them to be valuable resources to aid our own un- derstanding of the search process. Ruth Weintraub, the doyenne of search consultants in higher education, opened her files in her New York office to us when we were preparing our account ofthe Winthrop College search, which she and her staff assisted. Frederic Ness, Ronald Stead, Shir- ley Chater, Christine Young, and their associates in the Academic Search Consultation Service have been rarticularly helpful to us over the years in thinking aloud about the issues of searching and the use of consultants in this endeavor. We have learned much from long conversations with Nancy Archer-Martin, Kenneth Langstaff, Millington McCoy, William Bowen, William Tipping, Raymond Klemmer, Ira Krinsky, Richard Lan- caster, Maria Perez, Charles Neff, Charles Fisher, and John Isaacson, all alike in their willingness to share with us the stories of their consultations and in their desire to think aloud about how to improve the practice of searching for leadership. We are grateful to Stephen Garrison, Harry Marmion, Charles Nelson, and John Synodinos for their thoughtful reviews of our chapter drafts on the use of consultants in the presidential search process. A few search committee chairs deserve special mention for their contri- butions to our we Terry Peterson, chair of the Winthrop College search whose story is told in Chapter VIII, and Mary Sue McElveen, chair of the Winthrop board of trustees